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I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

• madrox 4mo ago
  I was a horrible student as a child, and in my 20s I strongly held the belief that education was broken. Now that I'm a few decades older I wonder if my problem was not education but life. I did not fit in at most schools, and that had a negative effect on my desire and ability to learn. That's what led me to teach myself computers as a teenager...education and online socialization combined. Win/win. I think the author is right that education isn't the problem, but they don't really discuss is the social element of schools. Bullying. Ostrification. I'm not really sure how schools are expected to fix that.
  • pokstad 4mo ago
    There’s something lopsided about education for boys. The system appears to favor girls heavily. There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population. I think this is a systemic issue with school being built to favor a certain philosophy that isn’t well thought out for 50% of the population.
    • XorNot 4mo ago
      What philosophy? The gender based outcomes people never seem able to come up with any coherent explanation of what they think the problem is other then to play to stereotypes.
      • bilbo0s 4mo ago
        This. A math test is a math test is a math test. What's the math teacher supposed to do? I hate to be that guy, but I think it should be pointed out that asian boys don't seem to have much of a problem. If there's a gender bias, why do they succeed?
        • s5300 4mo ago
          [dead]
      • rootusrootus 4mo ago
        The explanation that I’ve seen floated is behavioral. Boys are active and physical and don’t focus as easily as girls, who are more amenable to sitting quietly and paying attention. The idea is that the current predominant K12 style favors students in the latter behavior group. I have two kids in K12 and I don’t think it’s that simple. Not that I have a good explanation of my own, mind you.
        • deleted 4mo ago
          [deleted]
        • jplusequalt 4mo ago
          >who are more amenable to sitting quietly and paying attention Is this explanation not making a blatant assumption here that girls are statistically less hyperactive and distracted than boys?
          • rootusrootus 4mo ago
            Is that controversial (assuming otherwise normal children, excluding anybody with ADHD, etc)?
          • rocmcd 4mo ago
            "Hyperactive and distracted" is not necessarily the exact reason, but there is a large, well documented gap in performance for boys vs girls in elementary school (at least in the US).
      • Avicebron 4mo ago
        > What philosophy? They might be referring to the TED Radio Hour "Beyond the manosphere" by Richard Reeves. I think it was on NPR a while ago, I looked it up because the "school isn't designed for boys but girls" sounded familiar.
      • smelendez 4mo ago
        What confuses me is that the education system, especially the college track, was designed for men and boys. Lots of colleges didn’t even admit women, and they were largely excluded from learned professions like medicine, law, the ministry, engineering, etc. I haven’t really seen a good argument for what changed. I guess it’s possible that the school system was originally designed to teach young men skills, like quiet study and deference to authority, that women either learn more naturally or get reinforced in other contexts, and the schools no longer effectively teach those skills but still reward them.
    • rootusrootus 4mo ago
      > projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population Projections? Aren’t we already there in reality? That future is today.
    • fasterik 4mo ago
      It's not that the system favors a particular gender. The system favors personality traits like self-regulation, organization, and conscientiousness. These traits develop earlier on average in girls than in boys.
      • parpfish 4mo ago
        i'm not sure if it's an issue of the educational system, but for at least several decades there has been a societal push to correct historical gender imbalances by encouraging girls to do well in school, go to college (especially STEM), get a career. This has resulted in kids seeing a lot of messaging along the lines of "Girl Power! Girls can do anything!". Which to an adult looks like a shift in the tides of history, but for one of the kids that's all they've ever seen and i think that has an effect.
        • fasterik 4mo ago
          It turns out that when you level the playing field, girls do better than boys. I don't think it's about the "girl power" nonsense, it's about the ability to sit down, focus on something, and produce work that meets a certain standard of achievement. I would say the more harmful slogan has been "you're okay just the way you are." I'm not saying we go back to harsh discipline and abuse, but there has to be a middle ground where we hold children, especially boys, to a higher standard.
          • TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
            Boys have been sitting down, focusing, and producing work that meets a certain standard for most of recorded history. That ability is really not a uniquely feminine trait, and suggesting it is is honestly bizarre. Boys have also been doing more destructive things, but that's a different issue. Boys and girls do struggle with different issues socially and culturally, which is upstream of struggling with them academically. What's consistently missed that education is downstream of socialisation. The experience of learning as a first introduction to culture shapes consequences more than individual techniques do. Part of that is challenging all gender stereotypes. The traditional stereotype was that girls were frankly rather stupid and couldn't handle anything rigorous and challenging. Now the stereotype is that men lack focus, are disorganised, and have poor communication skills. One stereotype has been challenged, the other seems to have replaced it, and younger men have almost been encouraged to live down to it. I don't think as a culture we're emotionally mature enough yet to handle these issues in an effective way, and both education and socialisation will remain problematic until we do.
    • SubmarineClub 4mo ago
      > There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population. We're well past that. In fact, the gender gap in college graduation is now worse than it was when Title IX was passed. But because the gap favors women no one gives a shit -- many 'progressives' even celebrate it and continue to insist we need all these programs specifically to get women into college.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo ago
    Any time you try to randomly assort 30 children of the same calendar age into a room with a single (or even several) teacher, it's going to be bad for nearly everyone except those in the very middle of the curve. A very narrow portion of that middle too. It can't not be. And if the teacher tries to cater to the slow kids and the "gifted" kids even a little, then the middle-of-the-curve children will suffer for that too. The problem isn't "education"... everyone not destined to be a feral caveman needs one. The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work. But our single-minded pursuit of it to the detriment of all other alternatives just compounds the trouble. Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
    • in-silico 4mo ago
      > The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work. Do you have an alternative idea in mind?
    • layman51 4mo ago
      It might have worked in the very distant past. I learned that there was once a monitorial system of education where a single teacher might be in charge of many students, but only because the teacher would get a lot of help from skilled students who would teach what they had learned to other students in their charge.
    • kajecounterhack 4mo ago
      Isn't this just solved by better student teacher ratios, which you could totally have in public schools if they were funded better and societally we valued teachers more? What are private schools doing that you couldn't implement in public schools with adequate political will and money?
      • programjames 4mo ago
        Your question is easily resolved by looking up how much American schools are funded, compared to historical funding, other countries' funding, and their relative successes.
  • HDThoreaun 4mo ago
    So the issue with this take imo is that one of the primary goals of schooling is to socialize kids and force them to interact with others they dont get along with. There needs to be some conflict among the students so that they can gain and practice conflict resolution skills that are absolutely vital. I agree that the current system can be improved, it's just not clear how.
    • madrox 4mo ago
      My issue with saying socializing is one of the primary goals is that schools leave kids to figure it out on their own. Hard to know how schools are performing at that goal when it is going unmeasured.
      • bluGill 4mo ago
        Schools do better than home schooling. Those kids constantly do great on tests but it doesn't take long to figure out they are lacking socially. I don't know how to teach socialization other than kids figure it out, but I'm open to the idea.
        • bigstrat2003 4mo ago
          Some of those kids are lacking socially. It's not 100% by any means. The thing is that if you are home schooling your kids, you have to be intentional about socializing them in a way that you simply don't have to if you have them in a formal school setting. Obviously, some parents are going to fail at that but not all will.
          • HDThoreaun 4mo ago
            Well the thing is if youre home schooling it's really easy to just never have your kid interact with someone they dont get along with. Thats the most important part of the socialization though. If you dont put effort into making your kids life a little uncomfortable Im not sure how theyll gain those skills.
• dvngnt_ 4mo ago
  > ed-tech games have a fairly low density of actual useful learning. I can attest to this: eager to give my son a head start on the phonetic skills involved in reading, I tried a few different iPad games with him. He mostly messed around randomly until he got the reward, largely ignoring the educational content to fixate on the cute cartoon characters. I feel like defaulting to an ipad game is the wrong move here. We solved this in the 90's! https://archive.org/search?query=emulator%3A%28*%29+jumpstart https://archive.org/search?query=emulator%3A%28*%29+jumpstar...
• glial 4mo ago
  My own preference would be to build educational experiences on three pillars: 1. experiences. Intuition comes from experiences, and IMO an under-appreciated amount of 'education' is building strong intuitions. Experiences can include project work (including struggling!), travel & reading (what it's like to be someone else), sports and music (what it's like to build skills over time and work as a team). 2. practice. So much of what we can do - from language to mathematics - is a composition of rote behaviors, responses, and habits. It's impossible to become skilled without practice. 3. building habits of mind. This includes scientific thinking, applying mental models (I like this list here: https://fs.blog/mental-models/ https://fs.blog/mental-models/), pro-social behavior (listening, conversing). Much of science & math is having an available set of mental models, understanding how/where to apply them, and recognizing when a new one is needed. My preference would be for traditional subjects to be taught with these firmly in mind: when thinking about biology, for example, what are the rote skills that must be learned? What intuitions should students achieve, and what experiences will enable them? What habits of mind produce an orientation, attitude, or set of thought processes conducive to practicing the science and art of biology? I think this doesn't contradict the author.
• shermantanktop 4mo ago
  I've long held the belief that well-meaning adults who complain about "school these days" are mostly just talking about their own educational experience - either to complain about how they felt about it as a child (20+ years ago) or to elevate their nostalgia over whatever they imagine happens in classrooms now. Educational professionals appear terminally prone to fads and magical thinking, but it's the people outside the school - parents and other adults - who seem to have the clearest conviction about things they know little about. Appeasing ignorant people makes bad public policy.
  • singpolyma3 4mo ago
    Yes of course I don't actually hate what school is now. Not directly. How could I, I'm not even allowed to observe it! But I definitely hated what I had to do and it did not work for me. And that is useful information when I'm helping my kids.
    • hunterpayne 4mo ago
      "I'm not even allowed to observe it!" Was this true when you were a kid? Why do you think it changed? Because when I was a kid and a kid was bad, the teacher would make the parent come to class until the kid started behaving. Do you think this would work today? And why would some teachers be opposed to it?
    • shermantanktop 4mo ago
      You say you can’t know something, and then assert that the dated knowledge you do have is still relevant. If it wasn’t actually useful information, how would you know? How would you discover that? As you say, it’s a bit of a black box unless you volunteer in the classroom (as my spouse did).
  • AlotOfReading 4mo ago
    If you spend any amount of time listening to people complain about what is or isn't taught, you'll quickly discover that most things they hate aren't taught and the things they wish were taught are, at least in some form. Much of the rest is based on either outdated or misunderstood knowledge/beliefs.
• apsurd 4mo ago
  - "Learning made easy" is an oxymoron. Learning is biologically required to be hard. (brain needs a forcing function to get out of its default-mode and pay attention to the novel stimuli) - The hard part about education has little to do with learning and a whole lot to do with socioeconomic realties. - Education and learning is a public good. Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it. Any successful company that looks like it's selling learning is not really selling learning. (access, prestige, a promise to earn more $$$, compliance) I did not read the article. I just have thoughts. Got edtech nerd-sniped.
  • aeternum 4mo ago
    >Learning is biologically required to be hard. I think we all know this to not be true. We've all had a super engaging teacher or task in which we learned quickly and efficiently without it feeling hard. I've learned far more through natural interest or through pursuing a goal than I have forcing myself to engage with a subject. >Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it. This also seems obviously false. Suppose some company did figure out a way to make learning twice as fast/efficient and proved it with data, there would be tons of money in it. Duolingo is just one example that there is plenty of money to be had even with dubious claims and a product that doesn't actually work that well. The issue seems to be that no company has figured out how to make arbitrary knowledge interesting enough to a wide enough variety of people. If you take the extreme, people would pay huge amounts of money for The Matrix download to your brain type learning. The problem isn't no money in it, the problem is no solution thus far.
    • apsurd 4mo ago
      An engaging teacher makes the effort worth it. So it doesn't feel like the contrast effort required if oriented horribly. I fully believe there are good teachers and bad teachers. But that's why I used the word biology: there is no way to learn without effort. Your relationship with the effort is the important point. > Duolingo is just one example that there is plenty of money to be had even with dubious claims and a product that doesn't actually work that well. That's my point, it doesn't actually work for learning. Duolingo sells feel-good vibes of being productive with your doomscrolling time. It's learning-porn basically (could be worse).
• boringg 4mo ago
  You should be skeptical of all revolutions. Not saying they shouldn't happen but you do need to keep a close watch.
• freeopinion 4mo ago
  IMO, the best questions around revolutionizing school should address whether children should be coerced into learning something. It seems obvious to me that the answer should be yes. So the follow ups should be figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant. I think about three strata of students. The stubbornly unwilling, the coaxable, and the eager. It is pretty easy to design education for the eager. And discussing how to optimize that is a completely different discipline than the discussion about how to coax. The discussion about moving the unwilling to the coaxable is another topic on its own. Having a mixed class of unwilling, coaxable, and eager in a classroom with a mantra of "no child left behind" is a huge mistake in the same way it would be a mistake to have one teacher in a mixed classroom for Geometry, Alphabet, and Orchestra.
  • singpolyma3 4mo ago
    I agree this is the fundamental question and disagreement. I certainly don't think coercion is ethical.
    • protonbob 4mo ago
      Why not?
      • limagnolia 4mo ago
        Not the poster to whom you are questioning, but I would argue that inspiring and encouraging are much better than coercing, especially if the goal is to educate, as I am skeptical that coercion is ever going to work to get true learning.
    • Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
      We "coerce" children to do all sorts of things. We make them go to sleep. We make them learn to use the toilet.
      • b112 4mo ago
        Indeed. Children and not "little adults". They are emotionally and intellectually immature, literally with the brain and body growing into to the capabilities of an adult. And if good habits are not instilled, they will have a difficult life ahead of them. It's far easier to learn those habits when young, than to try to independently course correct as an adult. Not coercing a child towards correct behaviours, is doing them a great disservice. In some circumstances, it's child abuse to not coerce those bahaviours.
• questionmark808 4mo ago
  Just as you should train for your body type and genetics, there's should be an assessment with incremental pivoting as to what and how you learn best that emphasizes your idiosyncrasies. Bias against boys should also be noted. They get reprimanded a LOT more and teachers are a LOT more forgiving to girls. Men falling out of the system is not by chance.
  • mc3301 4mo ago
    Where is this? In Japan, at least in primary school, boys can get away with anything, as "boys will be boys." Girls must take care of others (first) and themselves (second). If girls misbehave, write sloppily, forget things, and so on, it is much more addressed than if a a boy does the same.
• method_capital 4mo ago
  The reason schooling is hard to change - here in the US - is because the teachers unions and politicians work together to reduce hours, reliance on standards, eliminate "work" (homework isn't good for them!), and increase spend and pay. Government is incredibly inefficient at most tasks - on average things the government does cost twice as much - but it's incredibly terrible at education. Spending has increased - performance decreased ad infinium.
  • timbit42 4mo ago
    Many, perhaps most, of the teachers are underpaid. If spending more money isn't helping, there are probably too many middle-managers sucking up the money. Remove some of the middle-managers and divert their money to the teachers.
    • method_capital 4mo ago
      I keep hearing this. I have yet to find a teacher or a school district or a government employee or department or organization of any kind that didn't clamour for more more more funds. We spend twice what we did in 1970's in real terms; results ... the same.
• bjourne 4mo ago
  The author cites 50-year-old education studies. It's exactly like citing 50-year-old papers about cancer research. They seriously need to update their views on what the state-of-the-art in pedagogy is.
  • hazbot 4mo ago
    Ahhhh but cancer treatment has gotten significantly better over the last 50 years. Cancer research has a half-decent feedback mechanism that means fads eventually have to prove themselves or die out.
• PaulDavisThe1st 4mo ago
  1. the best teachers (of anything) rarely convey information or skills in any direct sense. Instead, they create the conditions where (willing) students will (or are at least more likely) to have experiences that cause them to learn. 2. John Holt (look him up) 3. I always wanted to offer people the chance to both leave and return to K-12 education. Lots of kids want out as teenagers, and we should make that possible but only if we make equally easy to come back when they realize the downsides. 4. Almost every child is a willing, in fact, overachieving learner. The fact that they fail to be interested in a topic is a reflection of things other than their capacity and capabilities for learning.
  • programjames 4mo ago
    My experience was pretty contrary to points (1) and (4). My best teachers/professors directly conveyed information or skills. I found most students did the bare minimum to pass their classes (where "pass" = "not get their parents mad"). I tried to get a CS club started at my highschool and basically no one was interested, not even my friends. Now, I did have a great coach in middle school who "created the conditions where willing students will learn", but I don't think she would have been a good teacher. She was great at organizing club meetings, finding the right materials to study, utilizing intraclub competition to motivate everyone, and getting her former students to come back and teach in highschool. I'm sure there was a lot more going on behind the scenes that she just knew how to do right, which made the club a whole lot better. But she wasn't a teacher. Closer to an administrator, but I think "coach" in the (m)athletic sense makes the most sense. And, this is probably why my computer science club was not the success I envisioned. Yes, people are generally underachievers, but I also did not have the coaching skills to create the conditions where people wanted to overachieve.
  • hunterpayne 4mo ago
    You are projecting. Those things are true of teachers who worked the best for you specifically. In some classes, these can work. Unless you have a high tracked class of kids with engaged and pro-education parents, it won't. It also tends to work better with kids in a specific age range, generally 10 to 14. But its not universal and don't project it into public policy that tries to maximize educational outcomes for the majority/all of the students. It also tends not to work for certain fields, like math for example. Its better for fields like history where debating viewpoints is part of the field instead of the scientific method.
• vjulian 4mo ago
  How best to teach and effective teaching are problems solved long ago. It’s unaffordable for most. What’s being discussed here is how to optimize mass education so that it’s least bad and is effective for a majority or least a substantial portion of children.
  • hunterpayne 4mo ago
    "It’s unaffordable for most." Utter nonsense and the educational data says its nonsense. If what you say were true, the highest performers in STEM fields would be from the richest areas. In fact, the opposite is true, the majority of the highest performers come from middle of the road places. You are trying to make this about money. Its not about money. Its about the negative consequences of ideology and politics.
    • vjulian 4mo ago
      Scratching my head: The majority of high-performers would absolutely not come from the richest areas. The very rich are relatively very few in number.
    • Silamoth 4mo ago
      Did you read TFA? It explicitly mentions Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. The best quality education, based on the data, is private tutoring with mastery learning. That is unaffordable for most. Nothing about the data indicates that “ideology and politics” are having a negative effect on education.
• protocolture 4mo ago
  >General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught... students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught... what. You can teach anyone over the age of 12 the PAIR troubleshooting process. I have seen people with drug abuse related mental health problems cope with it. Kids are sponges. Soooo I guess I am agreeing with the back half of this section not the front half. >In short, whenever we have high-quality evidence that rigorously compares two teaching methods, the research invariably favors strong, direct instruction plus practice.1 Or, in other words, the exact stereotype of schooling that so many of the people asking me about school reform despise. Yeah it all goes back to Mastership learning, which modern schooling doesnt look anything like, because scaling to it would be madness. >project-building or acting like a scientist, it will probably be worse...Students are unmotivated. I feel like a lot of the systems being criticized here are designed to motivate children. And then all your N=1 people talking about their successes online, convincing people to approach things like this are related to having very motivated children. >Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer. Guy has at least 5 blog posts and a whole book on something he admits hes unqualified in.
• tombert 4mo ago
  I'm not the first person to state this, but it bears repeating: nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't. I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semesters. I did have some fun with it, but it was way harder than I thought it would be, and I think that university is probably considerably easier than elementary or high school. I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there. Now when I see people talking about how they're going to "revolutionize" school, most of the time I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything, or least never been required to teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.
  • Natsu 4mo ago
    There's a huge difference between things people are forced to learn and stuff they want to learn. Life does tend to make you learn a few things by force, but that can also kill off one's taste for a subject. Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...
    • tombert 4mo ago
      There's an art to making learning fun. I thought I had that skill, but I do not, at least not intrinsically. Maybe I could learn it, but since I was only a lecturer for about a year, I never really developed it. I am not going to pretend I know how to make seemingly-boring subjects interesting, but a lot of things do need to be learned that aren't always fun. I've always liked math [1], but I know a lot of people don't. Even still, I think having basic and intermediate math skills is important. I have no idea how to make math fun for people that actively don't like it. [1] And I don't think I was given M&Ms for it :(
      • galaxyLogic 4mo ago
• manesioz 4mo ago
  The mistake of the modern man is that he is more wise and clever than his ancestors, and that because of this he is able to re-invent all institutions from first principles. In the process, he destroys many load-bearing ideas and institutions and ends up with a more fragile, less successful, and generally more damaging replacement.
• pianopatrick 4mo ago
  Ya know, one way we could "revolutionize schooling" that would make sense for our modern world is to set up schools that make sense when both parents work. Like have school open from 7 - 6 with the same amount of teaching but lots more recess so that parents can drop their kids off in the morning and pick them up after work. Also, have schools available in the summer so parents can drop the kids off while they go off to work.
  • cmptrnerd6 4mo ago
    All the schools in my area have before and after school programs for parents that both work or single parents or any other reason you want your kids to be at school longer. I recall my school as a kid had it as well. There isn't traditional class work but it serves as additional recess before and after school as well as lets age groups mix. There is a lot of social learning that happens in that setting that is good for the kids.
    • eszed 4mo ago
      I agree with all of that. The problem in our area - I realize every local (US) school system is different, which itself seems to me to be a problem - is that the after school program is enormously expensive. Our kid is skipping (public) TK to stay another year in his private (all day) pre-school because TK + after-school is only, like, $50 / month cheaper. Not sure why three hours of after-school costs the same as 7.5 hours of Montessori, but it does.
      • cmptrnerd6 4mo ago
        Our after/before school system is run in partnership with the local YMCAs. There are high school kids that help in addition to some teachers, paid extra for their time, and paid staff. Maybe you could join the local parent teacher association and see if anything can be done to make it cheaper.
  • wjamesg 4mo ago
    7-6? Why even have kids
• erelong 4mo ago
  It's really just education - as well as industry - is over-regulated so there's no competition, ergo no cheaper higher quality offerings at a higher quantity
  • cortesoft 4mo ago
    There is no regulation around education, as long as you don't claim to provide any accreditation or degree.
• Xeoncross 4mo ago
  I would rather my kid was in a group of 10 students than 30. I remember very little time actually left for a teacher to help an individual child with all the kids to manage. Most people are scared to watch three kids at a time. I'll take 1-on-1 mentoring over better computers, books, clubs, sports, or anything else the budget is spent on. Please hire more teachers.
• falkensmaize 4mo ago
  If your goal is high academic achievement, the only real answer is a stable home life, parent-enforced discipline and high parental expectations (note I said expectations not involvement - highly “involved” parents can be worse than the neglectful ones). That’s it. That’s the big secret. Show me a school full of tired/neglected/hungry/unruly students and I’ll show you a school full of students that are going to be almost impossible to teach effectively. There will be exceptions of course, but kids who aren’t parented properly at home will struggle massively to learn at school. You can throw all the money, new techniques and technology you want to at the problem. It will not get better without fixing that fundamental issue.
  • acdha 4mo ago
    I find it endlessly frustrating that this doesn’t get more prominence - there are studies from the early 20th century showing that the biggest factors in performance were things like housing and food stability, dentistry and glasses, etc. but fixing those problems drags up enough unpleasant societal choices that a lot of people prefer not to talk about it. My wife is a public school teacher and I’ll never forget the time early on that an administrator tried to say she could deal with a kid who was absent more than half the time by making her classes “more engaging”. That kid reported rarely sleeping more than two nights under the same roof.
    • falkensmaize 4mo ago
      My wife too was a public school teacher for a decade, and resigned from sheer frustration and exhaustion. It became abundantly clear toward the end of her tenure that no amount of effort or technique was going to make the situation better. It’s really a completely broken system. The primary reason I became a software engineer at middle age was to make enough money and have good enough health insurance that she could have the freedom to leave a job that was killing her mentally and physically.
  • tenderfault 4mo ago
    I agree and I have the evidence needed to back up your claims. Stable home life? checked. Parent-enforced discipline? checked. High parental expectations? checked. Through some involvement though, to some degree: we as parents always show real and positive interest on what our children are doing and learning without really interfering unless they explicitly ask for it, and I believe this helps dearly. I learned by doing, trying at first to get involved too much - proved to be a mistake which he corrected it by himself, jumping from an IT career to chemistry in notime and shortly hitting silver at international chemistry olympics. I never try to interfere anymore but just be there, always ready to talk about it and offer the emotional grounding they so much need. Kids will flourish. My elder is on his way to what seems to be a strong, well built medical career and my 6yr old oh boy, she's ready set.
• rahimnathwani 4mo ago
  He's broadly right. And you should read some of the people he mentioned, like Greg Ashman. But this part misses the point: "As someone who makes use of AI quite a bit in my own learning, I can say that it’s still relatively weak at having a good model of an individual’s skill gaps and conceptual weaknesses." It seems like he is expecting a chat-based LLM to maintain a model of the user's skill tree. But it wo: - create a detailed skill tree for whatever subject - have the user try to apply the skills - store the user's mastery level for each node, in some structured format This isn't something ChatGPT is going to do if you just starting chatting with it. But you can design a system to do it, which is what the Math Academy folks have done. Edtech tools don't have to have user-facing AI. They can use AI under the hood, or use no AI at run time at all.
• nostrademons 4mo ago
  I don't think there's any way to revolutionize schooling on average. I do think that there are ways to make it dramatically better for specific kids. Pull up the tails of the distribution and you do improve the average, but not by a whole lot, since most kids by definition will still be...average. I went to a charter school, and one with a very different (project-based) educational philosophy. The charter school was founded by, among others, a business leader who had previously exited a startup he founded. He thought it would revolutionize education for his kids. Instead, his kids did extremely poorly at this school, and ended up going back to their normal public schools, where they did great. I ended up going to work for his next company as my first job out of high school, and he was recounting this story to my boss, who was a grizzled childless 50-something programmer without a dog in this fight. The school founder had soured on charter schools by then, and said somewhat sarcastically "Well, they work for some kids." My boss was like "Maybe that's the point, that the kids who they work for get to attend a school that works for them."
• idoh 4mo ago
  Schools are nominally about learning but actually about a whole of other stuff -- it's a non-goal to get better or revolutionize it, so that's the main blocker for actually getting better at teaching students. Parents want their kids to get into college, admins want to keep the parents at bay, teachers are trying to get by, unions want teacher protections, etc. There's no QBR where people look at the stats and iterate.
• themafia 4mo ago
  > Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer. Yes, but, you attended a school, no? You are more qualified to answer than you think. > for the average student. Who is the 'average student?' This is such a non-existent class I'm skeptical of it's invocation. Not once is class size mentioned. Perhaps putting 30 randomly selected people in a room and then trying to move them lock step through a subject is complete folly? Your schools are designed for administrative efficiency, not student outcomes, and "average people" simply do not exist.
• est 4mo ago
  This article reads like how to train a LLM without a large corpus your pretrain is doomed to fail Your post-train tricks hardly pays off if your base model doesn't scale.
• beloch 4mo ago
  Random thoughts: - Education should probably be an area where methods are chosen conservatively based on what is proven. It's easy to forget that a change in curriculum will affect thousands or millions of kids and could have a life-long impact on them. We'd pillory someone who suggested testing new drugs on thousands or millions of kids even though the effects might be far less pronounced or long-term than a few years under a poorly designed curriculum that embraces bad methods. - Neither should we give up on finding better methods. Education has undergone significant changes that have almost certainly turned out for the better. How well would a kid perform if they were put through a typical 18th century study of the classics? Latin mastery is not the passport to success it once was. - The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods.
  • throwaway2037 4mo ago
    > In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. This is true in all highly developed countries at this point. Many also require an advanced degree within X years of starting.
  • Laurel1234 4mo ago
    > The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods. This is a double edged sword, though. You have extremely knowledgeable people who can't teach because they have an actual degree in their subject matter but not in education. Also stuff like PE teachers teaching physics because they have the required education degree already and they can't find any physicists with them.
• insane_dreamer 4mo ago
  I don't pretend to know the solution to improving schools, but I'm pretty sure the answer is not EdTech or "more/better technology". The disastrous drop in academic abilities during COVID made it clear that classroom education is indeed necessary for children, and that EdTech's promises "software will teach the kids" were hollow.
• wagwang 4mo ago
  The obvious low hanging fruit is that most Americans just need less school and should skip straight into vocational training which can start as early as 15-16. These kids don't need to ever be even close to calculus or physics. There's an epidemic of overly educated people and it's a tremendous waste of resources and broken expectations. Just follow the people who invented kindergarten :))
  • geysersam 4mo ago
    I think kids have a right to be exposed to these ideas. Stratifying society even further, only exposing select sections of the population to advanced ideas in philosophy or science, will not help build a solid democratic society.
    • wagwang 4mo ago
      Works very well in Germany. Devastating student loans is contributing way more to the stratification of society.
      • selimthegrim 4mo ago
        Have you asked some people of migration background lately?
• PeterSchatz03 4mo ago
  I think this is the part that often gets underestimated: school reform has to work with average teachers, average constraints, and students who may not be motivated in the first place. A model that only works when the teacher is unusually gifted is probably more of an inspiring example than a scalable system.
• bfkwlfkjf 4mo ago
  Big tech in schools is just an attempt to get their users hooked young.
• ChaitanyaSai 4mo ago
  Schooling has been trying for ever to institutionalize and standardize learning without really understanding what learning is. In that absence, we've focused on learning proxies, which are tests. And tests resulted in a focus on mechanics. Meaning was and is an intangible so it got leached out. Everything school does starts at the wrong end of meaning > motiviation > mechanics > measurement. It is possible to fix school. It needs understanding learning, and also being willing to revisit learning design at every level. How to bring meaning in? Without meaning you could have all your fancy chromebooks and chatbots but you won't move the needle (as we are seeing) We are actually trying to change schooling (but with a tiny experiment, knowing that scaling does not happen without changes and cultural context) https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-paradoxically https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...
  • rimliu 4mo ago
    Understanding learning should start by understanding how much it depends on mechanics.
  • Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
    I don't fully understand your comment but I think an issue with schooling is that tests are the meaning of schools - that is, test results and graduating are the objective of an education. This is the disconnect I've always found growing up, I get told this is how you calculate angles, but besides the test, there's never the why. Granted this is a bad example because at least that one had a practical, real life application example (calculating the height of a tower in the distance based on distance + angle of the ground to the top from where you're standing), but things just get more and more abstract later on. The best teaching was always projects and internships, because they start with an objective and meaning (= build software that does this), and what knowledge you need follows from that. I mean sure you need some basic knowledge before you can work backwards from an end goal, but surely they can teach said basic knowledge without it just being "this is how you solve this test problem"?
    • AndrewDucker 4mo ago
      "test results and graduating are the objective of an education" No. The objective is for you to learn a specific topic. Tests are how we tell if you have learned it. Graduating is proof that you have learned it.
• fartfeatures 4mo ago
  We've known of a very good way to fix primary schools since 1907. Nearly 120 years. We simply do not want to do it because the labour and materials are more than we want to spend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
• roysting 4mo ago
  I am a bit surprised that not in the subject article nor anywhere else in this thread, as of my writing this, does there seem to be any mention of John Taylor Gatto or any of his books. He is a bit of a polarizing figure because he was a teacher of 26 years in NYC and was awarded the NY teacher of the year award two months before he published his famous resignation letter “I Quit, I Think”[1] For anyone who is at all interested in education or the system will be aware that there is an scene crisis in the teaching profession and teachers are quitting left and right, to a degree that it is a serious civilization ending risk. I’m not even going to start talking about all of it because there is no way to do it justice, but suffice it to say, when the system of teaching the next generation collapses, your civilization/society/country will simply just stop functioning. Maybe some of it can be eventually overcome where AI teaches your children instead of some government apparatchik type, but that’s a whole different set of problems caused by a solution. “… we need to realize that the institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate"; that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing." - John Taylor Gatto [1] https://saintkosmas.org/gatto-i-quit-i-think https://saintkosmas.org/gatto-i-quit-i-think
  • teslabox 4mo ago
    John Gatto's books and talks are all very insightful. His old website had the full text of The Underground History of American Education for free. Archive.org crawled the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/johntaylorgatto.com https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/johntaylorgatto.... (check the versions from maybe 10 years ago...) IIRC he had a stroke, and finally passed away. Now https://JohnTaylorGatto.com https://JohnTaylorGatto.com redirects to his youtube channel.
• arbirk 4mo ago
  I think we should start by making exams that mirror work day performance: Presenting ideas, summarizing, reviewing a proposal and commenting etc. This is of course more expensive, but keeping exams inexpensive is one of the major problems in the age of AI. Just to note: I was taught 3 different writing systems and my ability to write on a whiteboard is rubbish
• gampleman 4mo ago
  This is basically why the classical education movement exists. The fact that you can have remarkably better results using thousand(s) year old teaching methods/ideas than using 'modern' educational approaches is actually rather surprising.
  • fastforwardius 4mo ago
    Why is it surprising?
    • gampleman 4mo ago
      We're rather used to the idea of progress in most areas of human endeavor. It's fairly absurd to believe rolling back the last 200 years of progress would lead to measurably better outcomes is absurd in fields like medicine, industry, science, history, technology, cuisine, transportation, ... That it seems to be that case in education seems to me to qualify for the label of surprising.
• seu 4mo ago
  I'm skeptical about efforts to discuss changing schools (not even "revolutionizing" them) without even mentioning Ivan Illich or Paulo Freire. Here some links for the lazy ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed
• piokoch 4mo ago
  I was wondering about all this a lot. I was teaching a lot of stuff to students: physics, math, statistics (during my university times) now I teach programming and Machine Learning. I am torn between instructional based approach, which has this advantage that gives people a set of minimal skills to start doing stuff by themselves and the project-based approach, which is probably more interesting, but is very hard to squeeze in a relatively short classes time and also might left gaps, even in the base areas, as there is no time to cover everything end-to-end (think of teaching people about for loop, as it helps working with lists, but do not mention a while loop). So, there should be some ideal holy grail in between both ways of teaching: show them everything versus let them explore and invent everything by themselves. The crux is that instructional-based approach works great if it is well tuned to the student's needs. The problem is that every student has different needs and capabilities, so it is hard to do something that will work for everyone. So something is too difficult for some people, while being too easy for others. That's why we have Bloom's 2 sigma problem - 1:1 learning works orders of magnitude better than in-class learning. Now, LLM AI enters the scene, as the article is mentioning - individualized instruction could be finally achievable and I am much less skeptical about that than the author, as I tested that on myself, the good thing is I can ask and ask for more and more details if I am not able to grok something and my "teacher" is always patient, has as much time as I need. It does not mean that teachers are not needed, just the opposite, because the key problem is to know what to learn, LLM will just do what you ask for, nothing more, so one need to know what to ask about. But once someone is on the specific topic and problem, you can really go quite far with LLM as a tutor.
• literallywho 4mo ago
  "Revolutionizing" is nonsense when the stuff we currently have isn't even implemented correctly. My personal assessment (from my own education and having worked in teaching positions) is that we need realistically quadruple the number of teachers and they should be paid double to attract and keep actual talent. Nobody is spending that much money. Trying to revolutionize it without massive increases in spending is pretty much a cope. You can find lectures from 20-30 years ago saying things like that and yet nothing was achieved at all.
• martopix 4mo ago
  There's a big missing point in this argument: it says "better" or "worse", "it works" or "it doesn't work", but does not specify how this is tested. If we test students with standardized tests of their knowledge of facts and simple routines, I'm 100% convinced that direct instruction works better. I'd like to see if it's better also on aspects like student welfare, ability to reason and solve complex problems, creativity and innovation. It _is_ possible that direct instruction also works better in these metrics, I just think this should be made explicit.
• hiAndrewQuinn 4mo ago
  I'm surprised no one has mentioned Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education yet, which basically argues for a revolution in the other direction - get rid of almost all schooling because almost none of it passes a sane cost benefit analysis. It's very well researched, and the author has a long track record of being happy when he moves people even marginally towards his views. The praise here for Direct Instruction is akin in many ways to a lot of the research Caplan draws on, especially his findings that generally, most work related knowledge is built at work, by actually performing the job. https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652 https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
  • lnenad 4mo ago
    I cannot imagine coming to a place that has a reputation of having higher educated people, and presenting that education is a waste of time. All research has some levels of agenda behind it, and it would be very easy to steer anything the author presents into a direction he wishes. On the contrary, literally every country on earth benefited greatly from education and the results are very visible in all aspects of human development (HDI, GDP, pollution, literacy, etc...), most recently China, and even more recently India. Both had huge numbers of illiterate people, compared to both advancing at an incredible pace when a large emphasis was put on education.
    • rahimnathwani 4mo ago
      My reading of it is not that Bryan thinks education (aka learning) is a waste of time, but that much of what we call 'education' in the US, particularly with respect to higher education (4 year colleges) is just signaling. Very little is being learned. It's just a very expensive and time-consuming way to sort people based on skills and attributes they already had. Of course, the above paragraph isn't perfectly accurate. It's based on my impression of a book I read a couple of years ago, polluted with my own biases, other things I've read on the topic etc.
      • lnenad 4mo ago
        I strongly disagree (having not read the book and having my own biases). History teaches us that any education is better than no education. Formal education is very far from just booklernin', you also learn *how to learn*, you develop social skills, you network, you start understanding how to deal with administration stuff, how to deal with failures and many other skills... No country has perfect education, but what we call education is very useful for becoming a society participating human.
• Ile09 4mo ago
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• Andy_Donner 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• tobolek 4mo ago
  first you need to define « schooling », because you can’t put « schools » in the same bucket. ´technologists’ that aspire to reinvent « schools » generally refer to higher grades (usually > college).
• fuzzfactor 4mo ago
  >I’m skeptical of dramatic proposals to make school considerably more effective or efficient for the average student. Whther you're skeptical or not, lots of the things that are ideal for the average student, can be a disadvantage for the above average student.
• rustcleaner 4mo ago
  One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for trying to sound the word out. By extension the loss of basic Greek & Latin has had a terrible impact; at least teach just enough to learn that most English words are compounds of simpler Greek/Latin words strung together (like German's adjectiveadjectiveadjectivenoun construction), which is very useful when either encountering an unfamiliar word and for constructing potentially new words. Literacy rates are tanking as a result; Mississippi went from 49th to 1st in literacy by ditching the new-fangled whole word contextual style and going hard into phonics. Get them hooked on phonics again, then teach them Greek & Latin! Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the *second* foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first. It was a huge disservice to my education that the 'dead' languages were not offered to me in [junior] high school. I can only conclude that the curriculum and test writers only want literate-enough workers who can't critically think but who can [barely] read and follow written instruction.
  • dash2 4mo ago
    I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English. Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.
    • burnt-resistor 4mo ago
      In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.
• jordanpg 4mo ago
  > If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you. It is breathtaking to consider how many strong opinions of the young are like this. Strong opinions voiced every day around here. Strong opinions that change with time and experience and osmosis.
• brian8620 4mo ago
  With education, there's always someone trying to build a better mouse trap. When it comes down to it though, the basics still apply. In my opinion the single largest factor in education today (In this country) is the student's home environment. If the student isn't being set up for success at home, any attempts to re-vamp, redo, or otherwise modify the educational system that student learns from is doomed. If the student's family isn't reinforcing the importance of school, the authority and respect teachers should be given, and helping in meaningful ways, they are not setting up their child for success.
  • bitmasher9 4mo ago
    I think a bad home environment will limit a students performance more than bad classroom instruction. Bad decisions at the state level can hurt the academic performance for thousands and thousands of students. Both are very bad problems that should be addressed.
    • brian8620 4mo ago
      I absolutely agree. There are so many prongs to a complete education; mandates, curriculum changes, social and political injections, funding issues (particularly taxpayers needing to see a return on their educational investment), and so many more. One bad systemic decision can set off downward spirals in one, some, or all of these.
• ggm 4mo ago
  Nobody speaking up for rote learning but embedding core knowledge for recall has a role. Simply having recall that 1+1=2 and then inductance, not Bertrand Russel day #1. Same with literacy. Depoliticised it needs phonics and whole-word. And a shit tonne better teacher pupil ratios and more pay for kinder and primary. The Jesuits mantra is about "until 12" for a reason.
• everdrive 4mo ago
  I've really yet to see a coherent discussion about what's even _wrong_ with schooling. It's possible that coherent discussions are happening and I'm just not aware of them. I see two different patterns: - A list of complaints about what people did not like about school. eg: "The teacher yelled at me too often and then I became discouraged in this subject." - Working backwards from bad outcomes. "Numbers are getting worse. It must be that we're not _empathizing_ with kids enough!" Neither seem to offer a real, coherent theory. The first argument totally fails to address if school is doing the most good for the most kids, and it was just a poor fit for you. The second problem is more general -- it's really difficult to build meaningful theories about complex systems. The topic seems politically fraught enough (and for good reason, I suppose) that it's hard to imagine landing firmly on the correct answer. No matter how many good ideas you have, there will be so much complexity in the system, so many schools and systems that don't fit your model, that it will be possible to point to failure for any reform.
• satnhak 4mo ago
  Good teachers have a thorough understanding of what they are teaching. My guess is that most teachers in UK schools don't. From my undergraduate degree, many years ago, the only people who went into teaching were bottom of the class. For example after a 3 year maths degree a guy who was enrolled in a teacher training course after graduation did not know what a linear function was (y = Ax + C simply blew his mind). It's hard to attract talent because at best it's a lifestyle job that is kind of awful while you're doing it where the pay is low and the expectations are low, but gives you 1/3 of the year off as compensation. Unless your primary concern is a job that fits around childcare, then teaching is not the job for a capable person (pragmatically). Also 80% of the concern in schools now is "safeguarding", which from what I can tell assumes that everyone is a constant threat to everyone. Learning is not supposed to be fun, the way playing games is supposed to be fun. Sitting alone with books for hours at a time and thinking on problems has a certain joy to it, but that's hard won. Kidding children into thinking that it is, is a huge disservice to them.
• zulban 4mo ago
  Revolutionizing education is easy. Ask teachers what they need and then give it to them. Unfortunately that's boring, obvious, and expensive. So hardly anyone does it.
• rossdavidh 4mo ago
  It seems to me he contradicts his own thesis here: "The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill. For example, if you want to learn a language, you need to learn a lot of words. Any method that tries to skip over the fact that there are tens of thousands of words to learn is doomed to failure. All skills are like this, it’s simply that the “atoms” of learning are usually less obvious than in languages." ...but we don't learn our first language, or any other, by first learning a few thousand words and only then speaking. We start using the very first words we learn, in real life situations, and add words as we need them. It's the real-world applicability and project-based method that he pronounces skepticism of elsewhere in the same piece. Every coach of every sports team ever, knows that you need drills, but you also need to play actual games, to keep kids motivated to do those drills.
• alexpotato 4mo ago
  It's amazing to me how some of these techniques are part of certain cultures already. Case in point: In the book Angry White Pyjamas [0], the author is British and living in Japan. He is going through the Tokyo Riot Police training which involves a lot of aikido training. He is also teaching English to high school students. He points out that the techniques used for training aikido worked well with the students as well. Specifically: - show the technique - have someone try out the technique - talk about what they did well and what they didn't do well - have everyone else practice Highly recommend the book btw if you are interested at all in Japan, martial arts, living abroad etc. 0 - https://amzn.to/4v3rHdq https://amzn.to/4v3rHdq
• goldylochness 4mo ago
  i honestly don't care what other people do, there's no way my children will be sitting in a desk for 8 hours a day instead of learning how to live their life and survive school was a massive waste of potential
• dweinus 4mo ago
  Looking at WHO is pushing for change tells you most of what you need to know. Teachers? No. Students? No. Parents? Usually not. Technologists with something to sell? Bingo.
• gaoshan 4mo ago
  There are existing successful education models that we could and should borrow from. Instead we keep trying to reinvent things as if we and we alone must be the ones to develop it. I don't even think it's that much of a mystery, it's just that the potential costs cause our system to refuse to head down that path and as a result we get what we deserve, so to speak.
• freediddy 4mo ago
  There's only one real answer. Give more money to schools and teachers so that classroom sizes are smaller and the children can be separated by learning ability and the lessons be catered towards them. That's it.
• teovall 4mo ago
  What this article and the comments here miss, is that the current system is already working optimally for the people it benefits. That's why it hasn't improved and why it won't improve. The ruling class doesn't want the general population to be well educated critical thinkers. They want them to have just enough education to perform exploitable labor and engage in unquestioning consumption. They want them easy to manipulate and control. They want their children away from home all day so more parents can work instead of staying home raising them. It isn't some giant conspiracy. It's loosely coupled, powerful people, with aligned interests guiding decisions, influencing opinion, and swaying sentiment bit by bit over decades.
• Quarrelsome 4mo ago
  I've always wondered why we don't experiment a bit more around children teaching children. I appreciate it can be a bit of a can of worms but it would help the system be more self sustaining. The only reason I'm interested in this approach is that education itself is a massive expense which is often deprioritised in budgeting due to the fact that children do not vote, so it relies on the voting of parents to coalesce around a party specifically seeking to invest, which is difficult and unreliable.
  • dieselgate 4mo ago
    Very interesting... at face value it doesn't seem sustainable, extendable or consistent. Perhaps you need to elaborate more on what you mean about children teaching. That being said the "learn one, do one, teach one" model it great and I recall giving and receiving a lot of peer assistance when I was young.
    • Quarrelsome 4mo ago
      children who are willing, teaching children of younger years certain skills they already know. Ofc they might need to learn some basics of how to teach in the first place. Its a bit meta but teaching as a first-class subject that is optional with hands on work during school would be really cool and be an incredibly strong indicator of people suitable for management/lead roles later up the track. In my time at high school (UK equivalent) I don't remember receiving any peer assistance at all and its feels like we've missed a trick.
• jkid 4mo ago
  This goes back to something I’ve harped for years with friends and colleagues - the mistake of trying to revolutionize the education system is to treat it like an isolated case. Schools are a function of families and the community. You can’t improve 1 without simultaneously improving all 3 at the same time. The key thing is family - because it’s actually the family that’s the bedrock and the first educator. Miss educating the family and the whole endeavors is lost. After school, methodology, all these things, when you need to improve education you need to build a movement around doing so.
• Shalomboy 4mo ago
  I think the author hit the right notes here; we do know how best optimize learning for high marks at a classroom-level, we do struggle with improving outcomes for students who need extra help, and we do bore students to tears when they outpace their peers. Over their lifetime of schooling, students regularly a standard deviation above or below subject-matter-expectations do breed resentment for the parts of the institution that inconvenience them, and we would probably do well to fix that if we want to avoid ending up recreating "Idiocracy" from first principles. I wish more folks were more reflective on their own opinions like this.
  • aerodexis 4mo ago
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• jillesvangurp 4mo ago
  There are definitely differences between countries and differences over time as well. The painful thing for some countries is that decades of highly polarized ideological debate on this combined with austerity has had measurably negative impact vs. countries that made different choices over time. There's a growing cost of living and poverty crisis in some countries that probably is strongly correlated with education levels. That's also the urgent issue to address. And there are issues with students not finishing school. Or students entering higher education without basic skills for math and literacy after actually completing high school. I know some Dutch universities have had to skill up students on basic high school math, for example. No longer being taught adequately, apparently. And then separately you might wonder which skills are actually still relevant for people to have. People not speaking more than one language used to be a big problem in some countries. These days that's still not great but something you can compensate with using AI translations. Being able to calculate numbers is nice. But it's not the end of the world if people use a calculator for some things. But it is an issue if that's not a thing they can do. Education was never about enlightenment and more about making sure workers were ready for a productive live factories and offices and making sure companies had access to people with a good base level education. Before the industrial revolution, most people would not spend a lot of time, or any amount of time, in schools.
• lo_zamoyski 4mo ago
  I think educational reform has often been motivated by several different reasons. 1. The desire for a "royal road" to understanding. This is a bad motivation, because while there are more or less effective ways to learn, there is no royal road. You will spend your entire life trying to squirm out of doing what learning requires. 2. A utilitarian view of education. This is a tragedy of our times. People insist that their learning be "useful". Calculus is useless, because chances are that most people who learn it will never employ it for practical work. But this totally degrades what education is. It turns human beings into mere machines for proximately practical work. There is no theoretical desire for understanding things to understand reality better. This is false education, because knowing and understanding the truth are central purposes of a true education. 3. An "agnostic" view of the purpose of education. Without a destination, there can be no discussion of strategy or tactics, no discussion of progress or what is good education. The classical liberal arts had an answer. Sadly, much of modern education does not, at least not a clear, coherent, or healthy one. It is often an incoherent assortment of disconnected and disorganized material with no organizing principle. This is disrespectful to the student. Also, where motivation is concerned, classical education places a great deal of emphasis on acquiring the virtues that should always be cultivated in parallel with learning. 4. Bad execution in practice. Not all teachers are great. When you press people on why they hate a particular subject, how often is it the case that the subject itself wasn't the problem, but how bad the teacher was, either as a pedagogue specifically or as a person? 5. A failure to distinguish between pedagogical problems and the influence of the home environment. Parents are the first and primary teachers of their children. Students enter schools as products of their moral and social education at home. When the home is deficient, students may lack the appropriate dispositions needed for formal education. Sometimes a good mentor can help counteract some of these deficiencies, but the bulk of the responsibility rests on parents. With the disintegration of traditional community life into which family life is embedded, things become even more difficult. We also mustn't ignore that learning occurs within human relations. That is why a good pedagogue is so valuable. His goodness is first goodness as a person. Pedagogical skill becomes intelligible, human, and more effective when the pedagogue is like a benevolent parental figure who acts as a guide, neither dominating the student nor spoiling him. A parental figure also responds to the particular needs of the student, because there is a relationship there. The students doesn't just become an alienated number in the classroom.
• Kuyawa 4mo ago
  Teachers are workers, underpaid teachers are mediocre workers and the result is mediocre teaching skills. Now, being six hours straight on a torture chamber seating on a medieval torture device are not the best conditions for learning. I remember in the nineties I went to Japan for a course and they had executive chairs for every student, a nice desk, two whiteboards for projecting slides, breaks every hour, bombarded with visuals it was the best learning experience ever, you never got bored. And learning Japanese role playing different characters, that's how you learn a language for daily use. A student played as a cab driver, turned the seat around, and another in the back seat, asking to go to the airport, the academy, a restaurant, counting money in Japanese, paying, being thankful for everything. Unforgettable learning experience.
• MetaWhirledPeas 4mo ago
  > they should be more rigorous about carefully defining the knowledge objectives of the class, thoroughly breaking down complex skills into components, and doing lots and lots and lots of practice > As someone who makes use of AI quite a bit in my own learning, I can say that it’s still relatively weak at having a good model of an individual’s skill gaps and conceptual weaknesses Why not spec out the curriculum and spec out the approach (regular quizzes, etc.), then use that to guide the AI? Make the skill gap an objective thing.
• 11101010010001 4mo ago
  The problem is we keep learning that learning doesn't scale and there is nothing we can do about.
• teabee89 4mo ago
  Derek Muller from the Veritasium channel gave a great (and funny) talk[1] about how AI will not revolutionize education and I'll quote my favorite part: "The world is full of heavy objects; yet not everyone is ripped". Meaning that what fails with AI in education is also what fails in education without AI: lack of motivation that a good coach could provide. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70
• GarnetFloride 4mo ago
  Some people looking for ways to extract wealth through the school system. There are always cuts at the classroom level but more money than ever at the admin level. Some people are actively trying to sabotage the school system because the uneducated are easy to manipulate. Any effort to change schooling needs to take those things into account.
  • dominotw 4mo ago
    comment is competely devoid of any logic or facts. pure emotion.
• Jbird2k 4mo ago
  I do think that there should be a mix of learning opportunity as some students do better with different types of instruction. Some can read the textbook and just get it. Some need to talk about the subject. Some need to ask a lot of questions. There are so many factors that are at play. Structure is good it gives clear expectations. Students typically strive to meet clear objectives. If there is no clear objective they often struggle to achieve much. A child’s home life plays largely into their ability to learn. Sleep and nutrition. Stress levels. You can see it in a student if a family member is ill or if they have some sort of stress or struggles at home. They don’t perform at the level they would otherwise. For some students grasping basic mathematics for is difficult. They can memorize the steps of solving certain problems but there is a disconnect between what they are doing and how it can be applied to other problems. These students can be sometimes helped with kinaesthetic learning. Suddenly when you are manipulating real things it makes sense. I would say too much focus is put on teachers in a way as parents have nearly the same amount of input into a child’s learning process. Do they respect and listen to the teacher. Are they showing up to school ready to learn and listen. Teachers are not parents. They do sometimes fill that role or try to fill the void left by parents but this is not something teachers can realistically do for all of their students and stay mentally well.