14 ms·

Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal

189 points by aaronharnly 3y ago

ypeterholmes 3y ago
What about all the tutorials online that have taught countless people countless skills? Did that just never happen? If I understand, the core argument in this article is that there is a social layer of learning. And that's probably true to an extent, but how does that completely dismiss the value of self-directed learning?
- somnium_sn 3y ago
  Self directed learning like this happens within the social constructs in areas where people are very interested at a time or have a specific need. My understanding of the article is that is more focused on the general approach to learning, where the social construct, and help, support, even understanding where compared to others you are, is helpful. These self directed platforms can be useful in certain use cases but can’t replace the base education system with classrooms.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  The kind of people who can self direct learning don't really need much schooling. I don't understand it but some people need the textbook read to them in a classroom to learn anything.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  I would argue it helped older, more mature people who have greater self-discipline. Not only that but they are quite self motivated. They are great - for those people. If you want to teach every child (which is what we do) then the classroom is by far a better model. Teachers do this every day. They set online tutorials and quizzes for homework.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  I've learned all sorts of stuff from online tutorials; like how to tile a floor, fix my range, install a dishwasher, etc. I'm not sure how many people have actually learned Calculus or European History or PHIL101 to the point of expertise...
  - verall 3y ago
    I think Paul's online math notes got many of us further than our professors did
    - kredd 3y ago
      It’s not like we learned it for fun, we had to in order to pass. I don’t think I (nor anyone in my class) would ever learn strictly school related subjects (calc, chem and etc.) just for fun. And I went to an extremely competitive public school. Everything else though, like programming, video editing, some crafts and etc. is an entirely different thing. I would definitely argue without former, I wouldn’t be somewhat well-rounded as I consider myself right now.
adamsb6 3y ago
I think self-directed solo learning on a computer is how a lot of us ended up in the tech industry. I was learning a heck of a lot more outside of school in the late 90's, teaching myself how to make websites, than I was learning inside of school.
- jgavris 3y ago
  It’s practically a requirement…let’s say there was no iOS class when I was in school, but there was an App Store.
  - kalupa 3y ago
    half the iOS developers I've known were making software before the App Store existed ... but to your point about "iOS class", wasn't there any more general "this is how you use C/C++" classes? Objective-C was already 24 years old when the App Store came to exist ...
    - adamsb6 3y ago
      Computer science wasn't ubiquitous in grade schools back in the aughts, and it still isn't. According to this "foundational computer science" is offered in only 53% of public high schools in the US: https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs
      - tsumnia 3y ago
        Yup, my high school's "CS" courses were: typing, Microsoft Office, and HTML. The only programming lesson I got was from doing one chapter of "Learn Visual Basic in 24 hours" that I bought. I didn't know what programming even meant until I went to college and CS was the degree for "computer people". Even then, I thought it was going to be about becoming a sysadmin, not a programmer.
      - Izkata 3y ago
        Even the ones that did have one may not have had a teacher who really knew the material. My highschool would recruit a math teacher and have them take the computer programming course the summer before our classes would begin. They were always happy to discover a couple students already knew enough material to help the other students.
Ensorceled 3y ago
I think all these billionaires are caught up in the idea that the next Einstein is wasting their time in traditional schools, mostly based on the billionaires memory that their time was wasted at school and their belief that they were geniuses whose time was wasted. I was a smart, bookish kid with ADHD who was last in school decades ago. It seems like such hubris to even think I have any answers about how to fix the school system in 2023 let alone my personal experiences would have some bearing on optimal modern educational methods.
- Zamicol 3y ago
  It doesn't take a genius to figure out why so many schools are failing. Schools are failing for obvious reasons.
  - Ensorceled 3y ago
    Such as?
    - Zamicol 3y ago
      I went to a public middle school that's the among the lowest funded in the State of Colorado, yet it has frequently ranked in the top 10 in the State of Colorado (frequently in the top 1 or 2 for math and reading) and it's the top rated school in the city. It's also located in Pueblo, a town of historic poverty relative to the rest of Colorado. The problems with the system are obvious: lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. They also had the fewest schooling hours of any school in the district and almost no homework. It was ran by a genius who cared and was willing to say "no" to the dogma of his teaching peers.
      - Ensorceled 3y ago
        > lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Ah, the old standards. These are the same reasons schools were failing 50 years ago. > Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. Actually it does, Colorado pays below average for teachers. If I paid below average for developers, I'd probably have bad developers.
mchusma 3y ago
This is an odd/strawman take. Personalized education in the form of tutoring is consistently the biggest intervention in education, don't have the definitive studies handy but there are many (here is one https://edworkingpapers.org/sites/default/files/ai20-267.pdf https://edworkingpapers.org/sites/default/files/ai20-267.pdf). I would suspect almost nobody (Gates, Kahn, etc) suggest having an entirely asocial education experience. As we can figure out how to replicate the effects of tutoring with technology, we should see massive improvements in education outcomes.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Could we reproduce the effects of tutoring by getting rid of all the government contracts for school paraphernalia like smart boards and hiring lots of teachers while giving them reliable access to basic necessities?
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    Sometimes teachers actually want non-basic necessities like smart boards. We just need to give them what they want, not prescribe to them yet a different approach. I mentor a robotics team that’s attached to a set of high school courses. One of the best things I’ve seen when it comes to bureaucracy is that the three teachers who basically run those courses were handed a budget and bought exactly what they needed. A mitre saw, 3D printers, a plasma cutter, etc.
  - jpollock 3y ago
    No? A smart board is $3000. Another teacher is $66,397. You can buy 20 boards per year for the _salary_ (ignoring benefits and other non-payroll costs) of a single teacher. https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-12-education/public-school-teacher-salary-average/ https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...
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blah_why_not 3y ago
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- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  I don't think I've learned anything my entire life with a goal in mind.
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  - titanomachy 3y ago
    Surely building your search engine required you to acquire new skills? Presumably your motivation to build a good search engine drove you to learn things you otherwise wouldn’t have.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Quite the opposite, I built the search engine as a means to learn something new, both in the skill acquisition sense but also just to learn more about the state of the Internet. Like I'm very hands on with my learning. If I can't experience something myself and see it with my own eyes, even if that means building something from scratch, it just feels pointless. I'm also probably a severe outlier in not being particularly motivated by goals in any aspect of my life.
  - shapefrog 3y ago
    Since formal education - I don't think I've learned anything without a goal in mind.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      While I recognize we may have different experiences, aren't you ever curious about something?
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
So yeah. Having all the children at same starting point and having a good teacher walk them through with great pedagogy is going to work. yes. and be social What happens when kids don't get it that lesson, or that week. How do they catch up? Personalised learning is much more "personalised catch up". One thing that struck me recently on "The rest is politics" podcast is old Etonian Rory Stewart explaining that his (posh private) school he would get up about 8 and go to bed about ten and the whole day was full of structured learning / events. That (top) private schools might get better results simply because there is 2x or 3x as much teaching going on. Perhaps the answer to school is simple - spend 2x to 3x more. we might not like it. But maybe it seemed ridiculous to pay for schools and books for Victorian children in Dickens' day as well
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  Spend more time but not doing busy work. Some schools assign way too much of what is basically memorization, producing students who are very good at memorizing things and not very good at applying them. Also, students need breaks. “Cram schools” which simply assign too much work and put too much pressure, produce anxious students without emotional skills who burn out and in some cases also turn to be bad at real-world tasks (because they spend all their time learning how to get good grades, taking shortcuts and not “learning” the material). But a long school day full of sports, student bonding, interesting hands-on or “applied” work, and the boring essentials, seems like it would produce better students.
- aoki 3y ago
  Yes! These kinds of initiatives are not focusing on tutoring the ”ahead” kids as some think, they are about tutoring the “behind” kids because teachers cannot possibly overcome multiple grade level differences using classroom differentiation. So as you say, the teaching example in the article is entirely missing the point. The real question is whether you can get Bloom’s 2-sigma effect without a human tutor (for social accountability) when the student is disinterested. I think it will take more than just a chatbot to make a student feel like somebody cares whether they get it or not.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
injeolmi_love 3y ago
Even taking the writers premise as true, it’s not scalable. Most teachers do not have the necessary capabilities, even with training, to run whole classroom engaged learning experiences. School is designed to meet the capabilities of teachers as much as it does the needs of students. That said, most students don’t have the capacity to benefit from personalized learning either. The whole problem with the discussion of improving education is the assumption that a proper education process can increase the size of the “glass” by pouring in more “water.” Not everyone is capable of every type of thought, and that’s ok! Every type of person is valuable. People who are unusually intelligent should be given free time to self teach, and if possible tutored. Traditional classrooms work well enough for everyone else, except for the drug issues.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Any student could achieve more with more individualized education. You can debate the resource efficiency of tutoring the less capable versus the highest achieving until the cows come home, but there are exactly zero students who reach their maximum possible learning potential by sitting in a classroom with 40 other students for 6 hours a day.
psychlops 3y ago
I thought this was gonna be about the $100M given to Newark schools that just...disappeared. Soaked up by the bureaucratic sponge. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-education-newark-mayor-ras-baraka-cory-booker-2018-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-educ...
TheIronMark 3y ago
I'm not sold on the idea that this is an either/or scenario. Classroom-based instruction is critical, imho, for social development, but having personalized learning as an option for areas of struggle (or areas of excellence) that proceeds at your own pace has been helpful for me (as an adult).
ary 3y ago
"Rich people think thing that got them rich is good for everyone" should be a part of the zeitgeist by now. Individual attention and social learning doesn't "scale", so lets do the thing that does because "that's more efficient", the actual needs and desires of human beings be damned. Somehow we forget that one of the most important aspects of learning is a clear understanding about why one does it and how it benefits us. This must be repeatedly reinforced over years, and close to zero people want that reinforcement in the hellish form of a gamified and entirely soulless piece of software.
- shapefrog 3y ago
  It may be part of the zeitgeist, but it is also a meme. The subtle hidden message is that rich people are idiots who misattribute their success to factors like dropping out of college or getting up at 6am.
vcryan 3y ago
This is a user experience research failure as it didn't consider how Students view and benefit from interactive group learning. A few billionaires who prefer being alone projected their own personal values into everyone else... and apparently their needs and concerns about learning aren't the same.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
I think the core issue where I strongly disagree with this article (and also what seems to be the disagreement why at least some tech billionaires have a completely different experience on education that leads them to finance such initiatives) is concentrated in the following paragraph of the article: "I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms. That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging." "I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms.": I do agree, but (for me) the reason is not the laptops, but the classroom. "That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging.": Well, I felt alienated in school, and felt much more home hacking or on the internet (according to the HN comments to this article, this seems to be true for some tech billionaires, too)
photochemsyn 3y ago
I think there's a need to distinguish between childhood education and adult education, in that a main role of childhood education is to facilitate socialization, it's not just reading writing and arithmetic. This is why small class sizes are much more important in K-12 education than at the college level (although college discussion groups led by a TA can be very helpful). Also, personalized learning lacks some of the motizational pressure that attending a class with other people at a specified time imposes. Some people are self-disciplined and get by without this, but having a schedule helps a lot of people stay focused on their goals. Where personalized (nowadays, LLMs) tools are incredibly helpful is if you take a course that's a bit above your level and for which you lack some of the necessary background. With LLM assistance, you might have to work twice as hard as other students in the course to keep up, but you at least won't be totally lost. However, the old saw about leading a horse to water still applies. All the technology and assistance in the world won't help the unmotivated student learn much. If the broader culture doesn't value education, that's the first obstacle to overcome.
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BirAdam 3y ago
Personally, I think that learning on one’s own outside of an educational institution is perfect for those with the self-discipline for it. For everyone else, a traditional school environment may be the better choice.
afriday11 3y ago
My sister worked at Summit Shasta in Daily City (south of SF) as a teacher and then administrator. I can say that the school itself was quite a success, with a lot of local, low income students getting into Berkley, Carnegie Mellon, etc. Now did the CZI need to invest $100m to build that platform and could it scale, maybe not, but I wouldn't write the whole thing off as a failure.
jmuguy 3y ago
Nice to hear from an actual teacher about education. Billionaires have the same issue as a lot of other people - they went to school once, had some beef with it, are now successful, and so they think they've got some insight. Its funny how we in the tech industry (rightly) bristle at some outsider like McKinsey claiming insight into our world but can't see the same hubris when we talk about education without any background or training in it. Well except - we went to school once.
hansdelbruck 3y ago
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jo47d 3y ago
I do not agree with this article at all. While I cannot speak for the service specifically, self learning is in my experience _the_ dividing factor between OK employees and great employees Thus, investing in such a platform does not seem off to me.
asveikau 3y ago
I know absolutely nothing about "education reform". I knew this thing was a grift instantly when it was announced. Mark Zuckerberg teams up with Chris Christie. What could possibly go wrong?? So shocking that this doesn't work out!
- ch4s3 3y ago
  What’s the grift? He dumped in a ton of his own money and essentially had to write it off. Hubris sure, but where’s the money making scheme underneath this?
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  Grift? He spent his own money! Want to see grift? Look at California public school system which lights up $18k/student/year with little to show for it
golemiprague 3y ago
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iancmceachern 3y ago
They should have just donated it to the public school system
croes 3y ago
Has it ever occurred to them that not everyone can learn alone at their own pace? Some people learn better alone others in groups as it acts as a pacemaker.
ojbyrne 3y ago
A quick search shows that Mark (I worked at FB where we were all encouraged to call him Mark instead of Zuck) has a net worth of ~$100 billion. So its basically a side bet. His real estate holdings are probably worth more.
klipt 3y ago
Reminds me of that Isaac Asimov story about being taught by a boring robot: "The Fun They Had"
bicepjai 3y ago
Everyone here seems to have a valid perspective. 1. I now value personalization, especially after college when I grasped how continuous learning impacts my life. 2. I wouldn't have appreciated personalization before turning 21. I loved class rooms. 3. It's beneficial for billionaires to invest in philanthropy and gain exposure, but it's crucial to do due diligence when their actions can impact millions of lives.
sinuhe69 3y ago
Perhaps the problem is the mismatch between the class inherent composition (static, social but might be unequal) and the personal learning itself (inherently divers and dynamic). So instead of sitting in a static class, maybe the students should have their personal learning time, THEN convene per interests or social connections, for whatever they choose. This way, students will build themselves the social connections they wish. Another problem might be just the stupid statistics. 75% of any population are just followers, who only differ minimally from each other in no significant way (more in appearance than substance). Thus, 75% don’t need much personal learning beside what traditional teachers can already provide. The rest 25% can benefit greatly from personal learning and teaching but either they already doing that in some forms or they don’t build enough mass for a wider adoption.
epups 3y ago
This article is misguided, because it compares self learning with the presence of a good teacher. For all kinds of reasons, there are places in the world where a child might be much better off watching a Khan Academy lecture than their local teacher. And the personalized learning approach is easily scalable, whereas replicating good human teachers is extremely hard. It's not that Zuckerberg and Gates are dumb, it's that they are working on a different problem than this person assumes.
mola 3y ago
The concentration of wealth with the few is an abomination. It means that a few, with their idiosyncrasies are determining the future of the rest. Their biases are amplified instead of averaged out by the opinions of the many. It's not a harbinger of a sane society. And we're seeing the results everywhere. From the rise of the alright funded by the thiels and musks and putins. To the money burnt of useless educational startups.
- jdminhbg 3y ago
  Ah yes, nothing says "unburnt money" quite like the public education system.
  - mola 3y ago
    How is that engaging with what I said? There are many ways to fail. I pointed out one of them. Which is pretty dominant in our age. Such a low effort reply...
    - jdminhbg 3y ago
      You praised the decisions “averaged out by the opinions of the many,” which burn billions and billions of dollars in failed experiments every year. Happy to help.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Yes. I don't think it is possible to have a true understanding of what these (tax exempt) foundations are really intending - we only have what they tell us, which is a form of spin. As far as I am concerned, these foundations are about paving the way for commercial interests - their job is to prepare the ground with a view to the long term benefits that the corporate side will then reap. They are simply structuring society for their benefit; it's not for the love of Man. In this particular case, how would personalised learning work, with all the collectivisation that is planned and being implemented? Perhaps the intent was to personalise within narrow bands to give the illusion of an individual personalised education..
- 3y ago
_8j50 3y ago
Often, what lacks in these ideas is nuance and middle ground. The intent is right but the approach is lazy. What do you think of this approach: Gamify learning! Students get to learn sort of at their own pace but like gaming, they fall into different levels
_8j50 3y ago
Often, what lacks in these ideas is nuance and middle ground. The intent is right but the approach is lazy. What do you think of this approach: Gamify learning! Students get to learn sort of at their own pace but like gaming, they fall into different levels. Let them compete and be ranked against others at their level nationally but also be in different teams of less than 10 students at their school. Allow them to be at different levels for different subjects and attend regular in person classes with kids in their team/level. The grade system stays, you still need to pass all the subjects to progress a grade, it just might for example take a 17 year old 5 years to move to grade 8 from 7 and 1 year to finish highschool because they sucked at math in the 7th grade and it took them 4 years to reach grade 8 level and the 1year to focus on math for grades 9-12, because they finished every other subject at every level and grade. They could pair up and talk with students, mentors, teachers across the country to get exposure and pursue their passions. I am sorry but I am shocked at how unimaginative technologists are getting. It's like the disruptor mindset is dying off.
yathaid 3y ago
The problem with tech people in education is that they can only think in paradigms that can "scale". If Zuck's mission was to "build a better school" and scale that out with better trained and incentivized teachers (the non-scaling part), the approach would be radically different. Instead, the mission is to fix education as a whole and make it work for every person in the world. Which leads to looking in a complete different part of the solution space.
johncoltrane 3y ago
Imagine bloggers going on and on about you wasting a whopping 1 € on a lottery ticket. The "misunderstanding" in question is so much more interesting than that silly "$100M" angle.
hcks 3y ago
Tankies getting mad when someone spends 0.1% of the annual public education budget to try something out.
forgotpwd16 3y ago
>More students prefer learning in classes like Liz’s than plugged into their laptops with headphones, alone together. I have not proven this. It isn’t obvious to me how one would prove or disprove this, but I find evidence and experience pretty compelling here. One month one way, one month the other way for an entire year. Have students vote and decide which one they actually like.
littlestymaar 3y ago
Or .1% of his wealth. Even if he lost this amount every month he'd take almost a century to get broke.
mnky9800n 3y ago
A common finding since it became feasible to estimate social network status is that a student's learning is split in half between the effort they personally put into learning (homework, showing up to class, etc) and their social network status (who they talk to, how many do they talk with, how frequently, etc). This should not come as a surprise as it's common knowledge, at least in stem, that you aren't going to solve the problems all by yourself, study groups help. What's wild about this is that I couldn't imagine Facebook plugs their employees into computers disconnected from others to complete their tasks. Why would you assume this would work for students?
absrec 3y ago
The math olympiad coaching style education. Write solution explain to tutor is probably the best.
barrysteve 3y ago
Personally addressing someone is not individually isolating content to their tastes. Personally addressing someone is sculpting and interjecting/communicating with their subjective understanding of that topic. The flat, objective heirarchy on the internet can never deliver it. Well it can, but getting subjective structures into tech and tech teaching, is an uphill battle.
eig 3y ago
Reminds me of a classic short story by none other than Isaac Asimov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had https://www.bartlettschools.org/pdf/TheFunTheyHad.pdf https://www.bartlettschools.org/pdf/TheFunTheyHad.pdf People have been debating the utility and potential isolation of automated personalized learning from before we even had real computers!
stevage 3y ago
I notice that this author is focusing on what students prefer, whereas the cited examples were focusing on what is more effective for learning. They may or may not align.
dkarl 3y ago
> Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal. can, can Can't the author say anything more definitive than can? > Whole class work can feel personal. I consider it proven by Liz. QED. This is transparently misleading. Anybody who has been in school knows that every school has a couple of gifted, charismatic teachers who can make just about anything feel exciting and compelling to students. Name a learning methodology that can't feel personalized and stimulating if you find the teacher charismatic. I just proved everything works. QED.
mahdi7d1 3y ago
People who are capable of learning on their own pace are already doing it and the ones that can't use this approach shouldn't hope that a software system is going to allow them to. For me the questions of which professor explains better or the suggestions of not taking a course because the proffesor can't explain, were always meaningless. I never relied on a professor's lecture for learning (but had to sit through them) and my method was possible because engineering is not opinion based (Obviously I did terrible when the course was a amalgamation of different subjects from multiple books). But people who don't have the motivation to start reading a 1000 page textbook by themselves wouldn't have the will to watch 100h of videos around the same topic. In fact it might be even worse for them just watching the videos and not paying any attention. My buttom line is personalized learning has existed for centuries and changing its medium from books to videos won't make it possible for more people.

189 points by aaronharnly 3y ago

What about all the tutorials online that have taught countless people countless skills? Did that just never happen? If I understand, the core argument in this article is that there is a social layer of learning. And that's probably true to an extent, but how does that completely dismiss the value of self-directed learning?

somnium_sn 3y ago
Self directed learning like this happens within the social constructs in areas where people are very interested at a time or have a specific need. My understanding of the article is that is more focused on the general approach to learning, where the social construct, and help, support, even understanding where compared to others you are, is helpful. These self directed platforms can be useful in certain use cases but can’t replace the base education system with classrooms.
willcipriano 3y ago
The kind of people who can self direct learning don't really need much schooling. I don't understand it but some people need the textbook read to them in a classroom to learn anything.
chris_wot 3y ago
I would argue it helped older, more mature people who have greater self-discipline. Not only that but they are quite self motivated. They are great - for those people. If you want to teach every child (which is what we do) then the classroom is by far a better model. Teachers do this every day. They set online tutorials and quizzes for homework.
Ensorceled 3y ago
I've learned all sorts of stuff from online tutorials; like how to tile a floor, fix my range, install a dishwasher, etc. I'm not sure how many people have actually learned Calculus or European History or PHIL101 to the point of expertise...
- verall 3y ago
  I think Paul's online math notes got many of us further than our professors did
  - kredd 3y ago
    It’s not like we learned it for fun, we had to in order to pass. I don’t think I (nor anyone in my class) would ever learn strictly school related subjects (calc, chem and etc.) just for fun. And I went to an extremely competitive public school. Everything else though, like programming, video editing, some crafts and etc. is an entirely different thing. I would definitely argue without former, I wouldn’t be somewhat well-rounded as I consider myself right now.

adamsb6 3y ago

I think self-directed solo learning on a computer is how a lot of us ended up in the tech industry. I was learning a heck of a lot more outside of school in the late 90's, teaching myself how to make websites, than I was learning inside of school.

jgavris 3y ago
It’s practically a requirement…let’s say there was no iOS class when I was in school, but there was an App Store.
- kalupa 3y ago
  half the iOS developers I've known were making software before the App Store existed ... but to your point about "iOS class", wasn't there any more general "this is how you use C/C++" classes? Objective-C was already 24 years old when the App Store came to exist ...
  - adamsb6 3y ago
    Computer science wasn't ubiquitous in grade schools back in the aughts, and it still isn't. According to this "foundational computer science" is offered in only 53% of public high schools in the US: https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs
    - tsumnia 3y ago
      Yup, my high school's "CS" courses were: typing, Microsoft Office, and HTML. The only programming lesson I got was from doing one chapter of "Learn Visual Basic in 24 hours" that I bought. I didn't know what programming even meant until I went to college and CS was the degree for "computer people". Even then, I thought it was going to be about becoming a sysadmin, not a programmer.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      Even the ones that did have one may not have had a teacher who really knew the material. My highschool would recruit a math teacher and have them take the computer programming course the summer before our classes would begin. They were always happy to discover a couple students already knew enough material to help the other students.

Ensorceled 3y ago

I think all these billionaires are caught up in the idea that the next Einstein is wasting their time in traditional schools, mostly based on the billionaires memory that their time was wasted at school and their belief that they were geniuses whose time was wasted. I was a smart, bookish kid with ADHD who was last in school decades ago. It seems like such hubris to even think I have any answers about how to fix the school system in 2023 let alone my personal experiences would have some bearing on optimal modern educational methods.

Zamicol 3y ago
It doesn't take a genius to figure out why so many schools are failing. Schools are failing for obvious reasons.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  Such as?
  - Zamicol 3y ago
    I went to a public middle school that's the among the lowest funded in the State of Colorado, yet it has frequently ranked in the top 10 in the State of Colorado (frequently in the top 1 or 2 for math and reading) and it's the top rated school in the city. It's also located in Pueblo, a town of historic poverty relative to the rest of Colorado. The problems with the system are obvious: lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. They also had the fewest schooling hours of any school in the district and almost no homework. It was ran by a genius who cared and was willing to say "no" to the dogma of his teaching peers.
    - Ensorceled 3y ago
      > lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Ah, the old standards. These are the same reasons schools were failing 50 years ago. > Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. Actually it does, Colorado pays below average for teachers. If I paid below average for developers, I'd probably have bad developers.

mchusma 3y ago

This is an odd/strawman take. Personalized education in the form of tutoring is consistently the biggest intervention in education, don't have the definitive studies handy but there are many (here is one https://edworkingpapers.org/sites/default/files/ai20-267.pdf https://edworkingpapers.org/sites/default/files/ai20-267.pdf). I would suspect almost nobody (Gates, Kahn, etc) suggest having an entirely asocial education experience. As we can figure out how to replicate the effects of tutoring with technology, we should see massive improvements in education outcomes.

whatshisface 3y ago
Could we reproduce the effects of tutoring by getting rid of all the government contracts for school paraphernalia like smart boards and hiring lots of teachers while giving them reliable access to basic necessities?
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Sometimes teachers actually want non-basic necessities like smart boards. We just need to give them what they want, not prescribe to them yet a different approach. I mentor a robotics team that’s attached to a set of high school courses. One of the best things I’ve seen when it comes to bureaucracy is that the three teachers who basically run those courses were handed a budget and bought exactly what they needed. A mitre saw, 3D printers, a plasma cutter, etc.
- jpollock 3y ago
  No? A smart board is $3000. Another teacher is $66,397. You can buy 20 boards per year for the _salary_ (ignoring benefits and other non-payroll costs) of a single teacher. https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-12-education/public-school-teacher-salary-average/ https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...
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blah_why_not 3y ago

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marginalia_nu 3y ago
I don't think I've learned anything my entire life with a goal in mind.
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- titanomachy 3y ago
  Surely building your search engine required you to acquire new skills? Presumably your motivation to build a good search engine drove you to learn things you otherwise wouldn’t have.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Quite the opposite, I built the search engine as a means to learn something new, both in the skill acquisition sense but also just to learn more about the state of the Internet. Like I'm very hands on with my learning. If I can't experience something myself and see it with my own eyes, even if that means building something from scratch, it just feels pointless. I'm also probably a severe outlier in not being particularly motivated by goals in any aspect of my life.
- shapefrog 3y ago
  Since formal education - I don't think I've learned anything without a goal in mind.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    While I recognize we may have different experiences, aren't you ever curious about something?

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

So yeah. Having all the children at same starting point and having a good teacher walk them through with great pedagogy is going to work. yes. and be social What happens when kids don't get it that lesson, or that week. How do they catch up? Personalised learning is much more "personalised catch up". One thing that struck me recently on "The rest is politics" podcast is old Etonian Rory Stewart explaining that his (posh private) school he would get up about 8 and go to bed about ten and the whole day was full of structured learning / events. That (top) private schools might get better results simply because there is 2x or 3x as much teaching going on. Perhaps the answer to school is simple - spend 2x to 3x more. we might not like it. But maybe it seemed ridiculous to pay for schools and books for Victorian children in Dickens' day as well

armchairhacker 3y ago
Spend more time but not doing busy work. Some schools assign way too much of what is basically memorization, producing students who are very good at memorizing things and not very good at applying them. Also, students need breaks. “Cram schools” which simply assign too much work and put too much pressure, produce anxious students without emotional skills who burn out and in some cases also turn to be bad at real-world tasks (because they spend all their time learning how to get good grades, taking shortcuts and not “learning” the material). But a long school day full of sports, student bonding, interesting hands-on or “applied” work, and the boring essentials, seems like it would produce better students.
aoki 3y ago
Yes! These kinds of initiatives are not focusing on tutoring the ”ahead” kids as some think, they are about tutoring the “behind” kids because teachers cannot possibly overcome multiple grade level differences using classroom differentiation. So as you say, the teaching example in the article is entirely missing the point. The real question is whether you can get Bloom’s 2-sigma effect without a human tutor (for social accountability) when the student is disinterested. I think it will take more than just a chatbot to make a student feel like somebody cares whether they get it or not.
doctorpangloss 3y ago

injeolmi_love 3y ago

Even taking the writers premise as true, it’s not scalable. Most teachers do not have the necessary capabilities, even with training, to run whole classroom engaged learning experiences. School is designed to meet the capabilities of teachers as much as it does the needs of students. That said, most students don’t have the capacity to benefit from personalized learning either. The whole problem with the discussion of improving education is the assumption that a proper education process can increase the size of the “glass” by pouring in more “water.” Not everyone is capable of every type of thought, and that’s ok! Every type of person is valuable. People who are unusually intelligent should be given free time to self teach, and if possible tutored. Traditional classrooms work well enough for everyone else, except for the drug issues.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Any student could achieve more with more individualized education. You can debate the resource efficiency of tutoring the less capable versus the highest achieving until the cows come home, but there are exactly zero students who reach their maximum possible learning potential by sitting in a classroom with 40 other students for 6 hours a day.

psychlops 3y ago

I thought this was gonna be about the $100M given to Newark schools that just...disappeared. Soaked up by the bureaucratic sponge. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-education-newark-mayor-ras-baraka-cory-booker-2018-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-educ...

TheIronMark 3y ago

I'm not sold on the idea that this is an either/or scenario. Classroom-based instruction is critical, imho, for social development, but having personalized learning as an option for areas of struggle (or areas of excellence) that proceeds at your own pace has been helpful for me (as an adult).

ary 3y ago

"Rich people think thing that got them rich is good for everyone" should be a part of the zeitgeist by now. Individual attention and social learning doesn't "scale", so lets do the thing that does because "that's more efficient", the actual needs and desires of human beings be damned. Somehow we forget that one of the most important aspects of learning is a clear understanding about why one does it and how it benefits us. This must be repeatedly reinforced over years, and close to zero people want that reinforcement in the hellish form of a gamified and entirely soulless piece of software.

shapefrog 3y ago
It may be part of the zeitgeist, but it is also a meme. The subtle hidden message is that rich people are idiots who misattribute their success to factors like dropping out of college or getting up at 6am.

vcryan 3y ago

This is a user experience research failure as it didn't consider how Students view and benefit from interactive group learning. A few billionaires who prefer being alone projected their own personal values into everyone else... and apparently their needs and concerns about learning aren't the same.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

I think the core issue where I strongly disagree with this article (and also what seems to be the disagreement why at least some tech billionaires have a completely different experience on education that leads them to finance such initiatives) is concentrated in the following paragraph of the article: "I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms. That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging." "I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms.": I do agree, but (for me) the reason is not the laptops, but the classroom. "That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging.": Well, I felt alienated in school, and felt much more home hacking or on the internet (according to the HN comments to this article, this seems to be true for some tech billionaires, too)

photochemsyn 3y ago

I think there's a need to distinguish between childhood education and adult education, in that a main role of childhood education is to facilitate socialization, it's not just reading writing and arithmetic. This is why small class sizes are much more important in K-12 education than at the college level (although college discussion groups led by a TA can be very helpful). Also, personalized learning lacks some of the motizational pressure that attending a class with other people at a specified time imposes. Some people are self-disciplined and get by without this, but having a schedule helps a lot of people stay focused on their goals. Where personalized (nowadays, LLMs) tools are incredibly helpful is if you take a course that's a bit above your level and for which you lack some of the necessary background. With LLM assistance, you might have to work twice as hard as other students in the course to keep up, but you at least won't be totally lost. However, the old saw about leading a horse to water still applies. All the technology and assistance in the world won't help the unmotivated student learn much. If the broader culture doesn't value education, that's the first obstacle to overcome.

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BirAdam 3y ago

Personally, I think that learning on one’s own outside of an educational institution is perfect for those with the self-discipline for it. For everyone else, a traditional school environment may be the better choice.

afriday11 3y ago

My sister worked at Summit Shasta in Daily City (south of SF) as a teacher and then administrator. I can say that the school itself was quite a success, with a lot of local, low income students getting into Berkley, Carnegie Mellon, etc. Now did the CZI need to invest $100m to build that platform and could it scale, maybe not, but I wouldn't write the whole thing off as a failure.

jmuguy 3y ago

Nice to hear from an actual teacher about education. Billionaires have the same issue as a lot of other people - they went to school once, had some beef with it, are now successful, and so they think they've got some insight. Its funny how we in the tech industry (rightly) bristle at some outsider like McKinsey claiming insight into our world but can't see the same hubris when we talk about education without any background or training in it. Well except - we went to school once.

hansdelbruck 3y ago

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jo47d 3y ago

I do not agree with this article at all. While I cannot speak for the service specifically, self learning is in my experience _the_ dividing factor between OK employees and great employees Thus, investing in such a platform does not seem off to me.

asveikau 3y ago

I know absolutely nothing about "education reform". I knew this thing was a grift instantly when it was announced. Mark Zuckerberg teams up with Chris Christie. What could possibly go wrong?? So shocking that this doesn't work out!

ch4s3 3y ago
What’s the grift? He dumped in a ton of his own money and essentially had to write it off. Hubris sure, but where’s the money making scheme underneath this?
dilyevsky 3y ago
Grift? He spent his own money! Want to see grift? Look at California public school system which lights up $18k/student/year with little to show for it

golemiprague 3y ago

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iancmceachern 3y ago

They should have just donated it to the public school system

croes 3y ago

Has it ever occurred to them that not everyone can learn alone at their own pace? Some people learn better alone others in groups as it acts as a pacemaker.

ojbyrne 3y ago

A quick search shows that Mark (I worked at FB where we were all encouraged to call him Mark instead of Zuck) has a net worth of ~$100 billion. So its basically a side bet. His real estate holdings are probably worth more.

klipt 3y ago

Reminds me of that Isaac Asimov story about being taught by a boring robot: "The Fun They Had"

bicepjai 3y ago

Everyone here seems to have a valid perspective. 1. I now value personalization, especially after college when I grasped how continuous learning impacts my life. 2. I wouldn't have appreciated personalization before turning 21. I loved class rooms. 3. It's beneficial for billionaires to invest in philanthropy and gain exposure, but it's crucial to do due diligence when their actions can impact millions of lives.

sinuhe69 3y ago

Perhaps the problem is the mismatch between the class inherent composition (static, social but might be unequal) and the personal learning itself (inherently divers and dynamic). So instead of sitting in a static class, maybe the students should have their personal learning time, THEN convene per interests or social connections, for whatever they choose. This way, students will build themselves the social connections they wish. Another problem might be just the stupid statistics. 75% of any population are just followers, who only differ minimally from each other in no significant way (more in appearance than substance). Thus, 75% don’t need much personal learning beside what traditional teachers can already provide. The rest 25% can benefit greatly from personal learning and teaching but either they already doing that in some forms or they don’t build enough mass for a wider adoption.

epups 3y ago

This article is misguided, because it compares self learning with the presence of a good teacher. For all kinds of reasons, there are places in the world where a child might be much better off watching a Khan Academy lecture than their local teacher. And the personalized learning approach is easily scalable, whereas replicating good human teachers is extremely hard. It's not that Zuckerberg and Gates are dumb, it's that they are working on a different problem than this person assumes.

mola 3y ago

The concentration of wealth with the few is an abomination. It means that a few, with their idiosyncrasies are determining the future of the rest. Their biases are amplified instead of averaged out by the opinions of the many. It's not a harbinger of a sane society. And we're seeing the results everywhere. From the rise of the alright funded by the thiels and musks and putins. To the money burnt of useless educational startups.

jdminhbg 3y ago
Ah yes, nothing says "unburnt money" quite like the public education system.
- mola 3y ago
  How is that engaging with what I said? There are many ways to fail. I pointed out one of them. Which is pretty dominant in our age. Such a low effort reply...
  - jdminhbg 3y ago
    You praised the decisions “averaged out by the opinions of the many,” which burn billions and billions of dollars in failed experiments every year. Happy to help.
verisimi 3y ago
Yes. I don't think it is possible to have a true understanding of what these (tax exempt) foundations are really intending - we only have what they tell us, which is a form of spin. As far as I am concerned, these foundations are about paving the way for commercial interests - their job is to prepare the ground with a view to the long term benefits that the corporate side will then reap. They are simply structuring society for their benefit; it's not for the love of Man. In this particular case, how would personalised learning work, with all the collectivisation that is planned and being implemented? Perhaps the intent was to personalise within narrow bands to give the illusion of an individual personalised education..
3y ago

_8j50 3y ago

Often, what lacks in these ideas is nuance and middle ground. The intent is right but the approach is lazy. What do you think of this approach: Gamify learning! Students get to learn sort of at their own pace but like gaming, they fall into different levels. Let them compete and be ranked against others at their level nationally but also be in different teams of less than 10 students at their school. Allow them to be at different levels for different subjects and attend regular in person classes with kids in their team/level. The grade system stays, you still need to pass all the subjects to progress a grade, it just might for example take a 17 year old 5 years to move to grade 8 from 7 and 1 year to finish highschool because they sucked at math in the 7th grade and it took them 4 years to reach grade 8 level and the 1year to focus on math for grades 9-12, because they finished every other subject at every level and grade. They could pair up and talk with students, mentors, teachers across the country to get exposure and pursue their passions. I am sorry but I am shocked at how unimaginative technologists are getting. It's like the disruptor mindset is dying off.

yathaid 3y ago

The problem with tech people in education is that they can only think in paradigms that can "scale". If Zuck's mission was to "build a better school" and scale that out with better trained and incentivized teachers (the non-scaling part), the approach would be radically different. Instead, the mission is to fix education as a whole and make it work for every person in the world. Which leads to looking in a complete different part of the solution space.

johncoltrane 3y ago

Imagine bloggers going on and on about you wasting a whopping 1 € on a lottery ticket. The "misunderstanding" in question is so much more interesting than that silly "$100M" angle.

hcks 3y ago

Tankies getting mad when someone spends 0.1% of the annual public education budget to try something out.

forgotpwd16 3y ago

>More students prefer learning in classes like Liz’s than plugged into their laptops with headphones, alone together. I have not proven this. It isn’t obvious to me how one would prove or disprove this, but I find evidence and experience pretty compelling here. One month one way, one month the other way for an entire year. Have students vote and decide which one they actually like.

littlestymaar 3y ago

Or .1% of his wealth. Even if he lost this amount every month he'd take almost a century to get broke.

mnky9800n 3y ago

A common finding since it became feasible to estimate social network status is that a student's learning is split in half between the effort they personally put into learning (homework, showing up to class, etc) and their social network status (who they talk to, how many do they talk with, how frequently, etc). This should not come as a surprise as it's common knowledge, at least in stem, that you aren't going to solve the problems all by yourself, study groups help. What's wild about this is that I couldn't imagine Facebook plugs their employees into computers disconnected from others to complete their tasks. Why would you assume this would work for students?

absrec 3y ago

The math olympiad coaching style education. Write solution explain to tutor is probably the best.

barrysteve 3y ago

Personally addressing someone is not individually isolating content to their tastes. Personally addressing someone is sculpting and interjecting/communicating with their subjective understanding of that topic. The flat, objective heirarchy on the internet can never deliver it. Well it can, but getting subjective structures into tech and tech teaching, is an uphill battle.

eig 3y ago

Reminds me of a classic short story by none other than Isaac Asimov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had https://www.bartlettschools.org/pdf/TheFunTheyHad.pdf https://www.bartlettschools.org/pdf/TheFunTheyHad.pdf People have been debating the utility and potential isolation of automated personalized learning from before we even had real computers!

stevage 3y ago

I notice that this author is focusing on what students prefer, whereas the cited examples were focusing on what is more effective for learning. They may or may not align.

dkarl 3y ago

> Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal. can, can Can't the author say anything more definitive than can? > Whole class work can feel personal. I consider it proven by Liz. QED. This is transparently misleading. Anybody who has been in school knows that every school has a couple of gifted, charismatic teachers who can make just about anything feel exciting and compelling to students. Name a learning methodology that can't feel personalized and stimulating if you find the teacher charismatic. I just proved everything works. QED.

mahdi7d1 3y ago

People who are capable of learning on their own pace are already doing it and the ones that can't use this approach shouldn't hope that a software system is going to allow them to. For me the questions of which professor explains better or the suggestions of not taking a course because the proffesor can't explain, were always meaningless. I never relied on a professor's lecture for learning (but had to sit through them) and my method was possible because engineering is not opinion based (Obviously I did terrible when the course was a amalgamation of different subjects from multiple books). But people who don't have the motivation to start reading a 1000 page textbook by themselves wouldn't have the will to watch 100h of videos around the same topic. In fact it might be even worse for them just watching the videos and not paying any attention. My buttom line is personalized learning has existed for centuries and changing its medium from books to videos won't make it possible for more people.