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> The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an

> The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert—in chess, music and a host of other subjects—sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? This is an interesting point. I think our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in producing generalists. Especially our state schools. I think there is potential for improvement in producing specialists. As one example, go to the top universities in Europe, and look at classes in STEM fields. You will find a preponderance of Romanian students, far overindexing their relatively small 19 million population, which is especially surprising considering their relative poverty to other European countries. I would suggest that their specialist schools are the key to this surprising success. One thing about specialist schools is that selection is necessary. So the public of most Western nations will never accept it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
f1shy 2y ago
> our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in producing generalists. From a german perspective, I would say exactly the opposite. In my experience, the poorer the country the more you find “jacks of all trades” and less mega-super-experts. Of course, statistically speaking…
beardyw 2y ago
> I think there is potential for improvement in producing specialists. Let us not forget that these are human beings. I doubt I will hear an adult say "I was produced as a ....".
- dartos 2y ago
  No, but you would hear a school say “we produce the highest performing doctors in the country” or whatever
ckcheng 2y ago
> the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert—in chess, music ...—sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study... What's interesting is the subtle shift from saying objective ability can improve to asking if schools can encourage (motivate?) students to engage. I'm guessing most teachers know that given the right circumstance, students can be made to improve in math/reading. But getting all/most students to engaged in the right "kind of effortful study" is just a different task.
austin-cheney 2y ago
Selection is an important consideration in many areas of the US military.
kragen 2y ago
> I think our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in producing generalists. schools are proficient in wasting time, and most students would be better off without them taking the usa as a significant example of 'most of the west', less than 47% of adults can name all three branches of government https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-civics-knowledge-drops-first-amendment-and-branches-government https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-civics-... (only 24% knew the first amendment guaranteed freedom of religion), only 49% knew that heart disease was the leading cause of death in the usa https://newsroom.heart.org/news/more-than-half-of-u-s-adults-dont-know-heart-disease-is-leading-cause-of-death-despite-100-year-reign https://newsroom.heart.org/news/more-than-half-of-u-s-adults..., only 48% of usa college undergraduates in 02012 knew that baghdad was the capital of iraq (which the usa was currently quasi-occupying) https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9, only 42% could name sputnik, only 31% knew moscow was the capital of russia, only 30% could name einstein as the proposer of the theory of relativity, and only 16% knew gunpowder was invented in china you can guarantee that they were told all of those things in school at some point, but they mostly forgot. and you can't claim these facts are irrelevant to their lives (unlike some others listed in that last survey). a quarter of those surveyed will die from heart disease; all of them are governed by those three branches; all of them are subjected to racist anti-chinese propaganda and interact with chinese-americans; many of them had high-school classmates occupying iraq; all of them face the problem of religion these are not generalists, who know a little bit about everything. they're dunces, who know virtually nothing about anything, until they get out of school and start getting responsibilities, at which point they learn what they need to learn to handle their responsibilities it's harder to find good statistics on skills rather than declarative knowledge, but if someone can't name the #1 most likely cause of their own death (let alone #2 or #3), their decision-making about health is going to be seriously impaired, and if they don't know who einstein was, they probably don't know much about physics either. the few statistics on proficiency at skills that i've been able to find also look terrible if children were being turned into generalists by schools, then children without access to schools would be far behind when they entered the school system, and would remain persistently behind for years. in fact within a year or two they're indistinguishable from the kids who've spent their whole lives being subjected to schooling. examples of such children are immigrants to places with compulsory schooling, ex-homeschoolers, and homeschoolers who go to university how do schools in the usa, and for that matter everywhere, manage to be so profoundly useless and even destructive to learning? the 02007 rohrer & pashler paper linked yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274602 probably explains a lot. it's well known that schools waste students' time on overlearning, use massed practice rather than spaced practice (across many timescales), reward recognition rather than recall/retrieval, reward recognition or recall rather than performance, reward conformance rather than performance, and are profoundly dysfunctional in many ways. see gatto's famous jeremiad at https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20Seven%20Lesson%20Schoolteacher.pdf https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20... and pg's milder 'the lesson to unlearn' at https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

f1shy 2y ago

> our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in producing generalists. From a german perspective, I would say exactly the opposite. In my experience, the poorer the country the more you find “jacks of all trades” and less mega-super-experts. Of course, statistically speaking…

beardyw 2y ago

> I think there is potential for improvement in producing specialists. Let us not forget that these are human beings. I doubt I will hear an adult say "I was produced as a ....".

dartos 2y ago
No, but you would hear a school say “we produce the highest performing doctors in the country” or whatever

ckcheng 2y ago

> the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert—in chess, music ...—sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study... What's interesting is the subtle shift from saying objective ability can improve to asking if schools can encourage (motivate?) students to engage. I'm guessing most teachers know that given the right circumstance, students can be made to improve in math/reading. But getting all/most students to engaged in the right "kind of effortful study" is just a different task.

austin-cheney 2y ago

Selection is an important consideration in many areas of the US military.

kragen 2y ago

> I think our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in producing generalists. schools are proficient in wasting time, and most students would be better off without them taking the usa as a significant example of 'most of the west', less than 47% of adults can name all three branches of government https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-civics-knowledge-drops-first-amendment-and-branches-government https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-civics-... (only 24% knew the first amendment guaranteed freedom of religion), only 49% knew that heart disease was the leading cause of death in the usa https://newsroom.heart.org/news/more-than-half-of-u-s-adults-dont-know-heart-disease-is-leading-cause-of-death-despite-100-year-reign https://newsroom.heart.org/news/more-than-half-of-u-s-adults..., only 48% of usa college undergraduates in 02012 knew that baghdad was the capital of iraq (which the usa was currently quasi-occupying) https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9, only 42% could name sputnik, only 31% knew moscow was the capital of russia, only 30% could name einstein as the proposer of the theory of relativity, and only 16% knew gunpowder was invented in china you can guarantee that they were told all of those things in school at some point, but they mostly forgot. and you can't claim these facts are irrelevant to their lives (unlike some others listed in that last survey). a quarter of those surveyed will die from heart disease; all of them are governed by those three branches; all of them are subjected to racist anti-chinese propaganda and interact with chinese-americans; many of them had high-school classmates occupying iraq; all of them face the problem of religion these are not generalists, who know a little bit about everything. they're dunces, who know virtually nothing about anything, until they get out of school and start getting responsibilities, at which point they learn what they need to learn to handle their responsibilities it's harder to find good statistics on skills rather than declarative knowledge, but if someone can't name the #1 most likely cause of their own death (let alone #2 or #3), their decision-making about health is going to be seriously impaired, and if they don't know who einstein was, they probably don't know much about physics either. the few statistics on proficiency at skills that i've been able to find also look terrible if children were being turned into generalists by schools, then children without access to schools would be far behind when they entered the school system, and would remain persistently behind for years. in fact within a year or two they're indistinguishable from the kids who've spent their whole lives being subjected to schooling. examples of such children are immigrants to places with compulsory schooling, ex-homeschoolers, and homeschoolers who go to university how do schools in the usa, and for that matter everywhere, manage to be so profoundly useless and even destructive to learning? the 02007 rohrer & pashler paper linked yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274602 probably explains a lot. it's well known that schools waste students' time on overlearning, use massed practice rather than spaced practice (across many timescales), reward recognition rather than recall/retrieval, reward recognition or recall rather than performance, reward conformance rather than performance, and are profoundly dysfunctional in many ways. see gatto's famous jeremiad at https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20Seven%20Lesson%20Schoolteacher.pdf https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20... and pg's milder 'the lesson to unlearn' at https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html