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The fundamental problem with the elementary school system in the west is that kids are given no room for self-direction whatsoever; school for them is de facto

The fundamental problem with the elementary school system in the west is that kids are given no room for self-direction whatsoever; school for them is de facto a part-time prison or "labor" camp. As a result they are trained by association to dread to that which the system purports to champion: learning, culture, reading, knowledge, even any demonstration of intelligence. It takes a combination of luck, will and positive external influences (good parents, a mentor) to overcome that. But most kids don't. Which is why it seems to me that "setting kids free", in the sense of giving them significant latitude for self-direction in their activities and education, is a great principle. The key problem of education is motivation. Most kids are smart and fast learners, the only difficulty in getting them to learn is to get them interested (even better: passionate). The only way that can happen is by giving them choice, freedom. The opportunity to exercise free will. Let's guide kids, not force them to sit and listen passively (they won't).

prestadige 12y ago
True, except that it's more the case in unschooling for adults to be guided by the children, being available to give help or find help when required. It takes years for the average adult to break his school conditioning and find the courage to follow his own direction. Most never manage it, and of those that do, most don't till retirement, which is tragic.
samirmenon 12y ago
Perhaps I am clouded by my own positive experiences with school, but I disagree on two levels. Firstly, your use of the phrase 'in the west' implies that outside of the 'west' there is some different, better elementary education system. This has not been my experience in India, where capacity for rote memorization is regarded as equivalent to intelligence from an early age. What countries fit your boundaries of 'the west'? Secondly, school serves as a valuable social and educational center to most children. Even though elementary education is imperfect, it does not mean that a viable solution is to simply do away with it. In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.
- fchollet 12y ago
  I did not imply anything about school systems outside the western world, I used the term simply because I know close to nothing about education outside the west and therefore did not want to include it in my description. I also certainly did not imply that children should be educated in isolation. I agree that social interaction with other children is fundamental to kids' development throughout elementary education. In fact, if you followed my suggestion and let kids do, to a certain extent, what they were interested in, I assume you would see most of them gravitate towards social learning, because that's how most humans are wired.
  - rodgerd 12y ago
    > I did not imply anything about school systems outside the western world, You obviously don't know anything about the plethora of different systems inside the Western world, either.
    - fchollet 12y ago
      Hey, thank you for this sharp and insightful one-liner. I am keenly aware of my own ignorance, and always looking for opportunities to learn. Care to enlighten me?
      - rodgerd 12y ago
        Start with Beeby in New Zealand.
- llllllllllll 12y ago
  In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships. And unfortunately social interaction is severely restricted and punished in K-12 education (in the US, which is the extent of my familiarity). I volunteered at an elementary school for a year, and the kids there had little opportunity to socialize freely. Recess and lunch were limited to a combined 40 minutes, including transition periods to and from the classroom. Gym/physical education was a "unit", only attended one week out of every three, and much like I remembered from my own schooling, more than half of that time is spent explaining the rules to some highly-structured, barely-constitutes-exercise activity.
capkutay 12y ago
This is partly attributed to 'No Child Left Behind'. The fact that public funding for schools is strictly determined by each school's performance on rigid, standardized tests is a huge issue. How can schools allow free-flowing learning, culture, exploration, and self direction when they HAVE to perform well on standardized tests?
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  This is bullshit. Sit down, shut up and do as you're told has been the primary and secondary school curriculum in most every mass school system everywhere. John Taylor Gatto wrote Seven Lessons long before No Child Left Behind. http://the7lessonteacher.com/ http://the7lessonteacher.com/
jiggy2011 12y ago
I don't know if self-direction is really a good idea. When I was a kid I would have directed myself towards video games and cartoons. I probably would not have independently developed an interest in english grammer and math.
- glenra 12y ago
  Video games and cartoons can be valuable learning experiences. We learn a lot through play. If you got into minecraft you'd be doing engineering. If you got into Wildstar or WoW or some other guild-based combat system you'd be learning leadership and social dynamics - how to keep a team together and happy - and also a certain amount of math. If you got into Quake-like games you might discover the modding community and get interested in learning how to be a level designer, a programmer, a visual artist, or an architect. Or take "watching cartoons". You might discover stop-motion and start making your own. Or if you got into Anime you might get interested in learning Japanese. The Sudbury schools emphasize the power of boredom. When you don't play videogames that much you might FEEL like you could play them all the time if allowed to. But if you were ACTUALLY allowed to, you'd eventually get bored and want to go deeper. And then you'd inevitably be learning stuff. A repeated discovery was that most kids eventually DO decide they want to learn math, in part because it's something other people can do that seems like it might be useful. And when kids are actually interested in the subject, they can learn it in a really TINY amount of contact hours and it doesn't harm them at all to have waited a few extra years. The reason standard schools waste so much time teaching math is that they're trying to force kids who aren't interested at all in learning it on the school's schedule rather than their own. As for "english grammar", you can learn that just by using some of your freed-up time to read lots of books. Here's a story that involves teaching 6 years of math in 20 hours of class time: http://sudburyschool.com/articles/free-last http://sudburyschool.com/articles/free-last
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    I think it might be wishful thinking to imagine that kids left to their own devices will identify and persue useful skills without adult guidance. Even if every kid who watches cartoons develops an interest in stop motion animation, how many stop motion animators do we need? How would you even understand how to start with quake modding without knowing basic math and reading comprehension? When I was at school there were kids who would frequently "unschool" themselves by skipping class, the interests they developed were mostly related to vandalism and other petty crime.
ekianjo 12y ago
> elementary school system in the west is that kids are given no room for self-direction To be fair this is happening not just in the West. Japan's education system is a disaster in itself which creates kids who stop asking questions after a couple of years. I let you imagine what you end up when they reach the state of adulthood.
- dredericktatum 12y ago
  Japan are part of the west. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I say 'the west', I'm not talking about geography. I mean cultures that value economic success above most everything else. Besides, they're only 'west' when the US is on the left side of your projection of the globe. It's a useful and well understood colloquialism so I use it. PS: I'm not saying economy is to blame, but the idea that there's exactly one way to be successful (make money in this case), given enough time and belief, will eventually devolve and create dysfunctional systems like those we see in schools today where individuality is quickly eroded because a 'higher' goal is being chased: pass your tests so you can progress to college (or whatever) and then become a success. Step one: learn the same stuff, in the same way as everyone else (in an environment that, by design or not, encourages conformity), step 2: ???, step 3: PROFIT.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    Japan is not really part of the West per se. There is still so much cultural legacy at work in the industry and politics, if its part of the West then its a very poor imitation of it. And lets not talk about the place of women in "westernized" Japan, lets not.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  It doesn't seem to have hurt the Japanese ability to innovate in technology and culture too much though.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    Maybe you missed the fact Japan s economy has been in recession for the past 20 years or so. Its not so much a hotbed of technology anymore. Or if it is, they are clearly failing at making money with it.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
I'm all for making school more fun. But self-direction? Don't forget: these are children. Most (and certainly enough) of them won't have any natural inclination to learn even reading, writing and math. The whole point of having schools is to give an external sense of direction. I think schools need to be optimized and tuned, but please, please stop these extreme experiments.
- Lalakh 12y ago
  Having worked with much younger children for several years, I can assure you that most children start of with a natural inclination to learn how to read & understand math, just maybe not in the structured 'worksheet' type approach you see in some schools. A child that enjoys baking becomes naturally motivated to learn how to understand recipes, a child that is interested in computers & games wants to learn how to recognise the symbols that start their favourite game. It is all about finding the right motivation. For the even the most reluctant writers it can be about building up the necessary physical skills using less obvious means- lego, clay, eye droppers in the water area. Then instead of practising writing we are making road signs for our car game or writing a list of things to take on our outing. The point is when young children are given a supportive, no pressure approach that acknowledges & responds to their interests they do have a natural inclination to learn those skills and others. They just need adults that know how to facilitate & scaffold that learning. What is more important- that a child knows how to read by 4 or a child who learns at their own pace, and is far more likely to become someone who loves reading for pleasure?
- nekopa 12y ago
  Children don't necessarily want to learn,they want to do things. And sometimes their lack of knowledge stops them from doing what they want and therefore they become motivated to learn what they need to overcome that. These are other extreme experiments, and self guided learning has been used for quite a while and quite successfully (re montessori)
- rapind 12y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. My kids are only 2 and 3, but what they've learned has been entirely driven by their own interests. They learned to talk because not being able to communicate well is frustrating. They learned to walk because crawling everywhere is frustrating, etc. Not because I sat them down and said "OK, now it's time for our talking lesson". Why would this suddenly change? As a parent I think it's still your job to evaluate the things that are positive and negative and try to limit the negative influences, like TV or intentionally addictive video games (farmville, wow, etc.), but I don't see how this is at all related to school. School shouldn't be exempt from being scrutinized for it's positive or negative effects. When I finished school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. School classes bored the crap out of me for the most part, and not because I'm too smart (which I'm not), but because it just wasn't interesting. I had no practical or immediate use of the material being taught. I use to think I was deficient and had an attention deficit disorder. Occasionally a lesson would interest me and I would excel at it, but soon we'd move on to some other boring topic. Many years later, looking at my own day to day life, I am constantly learning. The things I learn have either a practical and immediate use, or they simply interest me. Many of the lessons in school I thought were boring would have interested me at some point in my life when they were more relevant. I wish I had started self-learning earlier.
Angostura 12y ago
I've got too kids in primary school in the UK, and my experiences are entirely different. They've gone through schools with lovely, kind, nuturing teachers who have instilled an interest in learning. My youngest daughter delights in maths puzzled and writing bizarre and gruesome stories, for which she has been awarded and praised. My eldest daughter as just finished primary and enjoyed all of it (apart from French) and the P.E teacher recently unearthed an apparent latent talent for cricket (I couldn't catch a ball if you asked me). Sweeping generalisations about any mode of education is bad. I was lucky in that my kids and school were well matched. But yes, we did also work hard to support the work of the school.
- joelhooks 12y ago
  Taking luck out of the equation was a primary reason for not sending any of our kids to school. You are right, you are lucky.
lostcolony 12y ago
Choice, but also, role models. How does a kid know they want to learn to read, except to see others reading? How does a kid know they want to learn math, except to see someone else able to solve a useful problem they had no idea could be solved? In a thread on income inequality, someone posited that the best indicator for economic success was whether a person was read to as a child. They meant it as a holistic indicator over a number of factors, and I think one large one is that it meant the child early on had a role model for education. I know for myself (anecdotal evidence, yeah yeah), I chafed very early on to learn to read, because my parents could and I couldn't. Similarly, early on, while I could figure out some kinds of math (the basic of multiplication by seeing arrangements of windows, "oh, three fours is twelve!", and then being given a toy that had the multiplication tables on opaque buttons that when pressed would show the answer, I recall other times when people were able to solve problems (long division, multiplication of 2 or more digit numbers) that I didn't know how to solve, and I -desperately- wanted to. For a friend, who came from a rural family whose only owned book was a Bible, largely unread, it was when I introduced him to video games (RPGs), and fantasy novels, that he really began to read, and actually to purchase books himself.
- fchollet 12y ago
  Completely agree --the fundamental problem to solve is that of motivation, and motivation will very often come from role models and mentors. The function of a mentor is not limited to providing an example of what can be learned and why it should be learned. A mentor should also directly provide motivation reenforcement whenever the kid shows progress on the right path. The best education will be self-direction in a culturally rich environment that rewards and celebrates learning and educative achievements.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Sure, self-directed. But then the support of a tutor is invaluable! Why let the poor kid flounder around, motivated but unskilled at learning? Show them the right path! Or at least all the options.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Learning can be hard. Kids love easy things. It takes direction, monitoring, pushing to get them to try to read, or do arithmetic, or master pretty much any delayed-gratification skill. Left on their own, kids will likely get a broad shallow education with one or two deep dives into subjects of dubious value.

prestadige 12y ago

True, except that it's more the case in unschooling for adults to be guided by the children, being available to give help or find help when required. It takes years for the average adult to break his school conditioning and find the courage to follow his own direction. Most never manage it, and of those that do, most don't till retirement, which is tragic.

samirmenon 12y ago

Perhaps I am clouded by my own positive experiences with school, but I disagree on two levels. Firstly, your use of the phrase 'in the west' implies that outside of the 'west' there is some different, better elementary education system. This has not been my experience in India, where capacity for rote memorization is regarded as equivalent to intelligence from an early age. What countries fit your boundaries of 'the west'? Secondly, school serves as a valuable social and educational center to most children. Even though elementary education is imperfect, it does not mean that a viable solution is to simply do away with it. In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.

fchollet 12y ago
I did not imply anything about school systems outside the western world, I used the term simply because I know close to nothing about education outside the west and therefore did not want to include it in my description. I also certainly did not imply that children should be educated in isolation. I agree that social interaction with other children is fundamental to kids' development throughout elementary education. In fact, if you followed my suggestion and let kids do, to a certain extent, what they were interested in, I assume you would see most of them gravitate towards social learning, because that's how most humans are wired.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  > I did not imply anything about school systems outside the western world, You obviously don't know anything about the plethora of different systems inside the Western world, either.
  - fchollet 12y ago
    Hey, thank you for this sharp and insightful one-liner. I am keenly aware of my own ignorance, and always looking for opportunities to learn. Care to enlighten me?
    - rodgerd 12y ago
      Start with Beeby in New Zealand.
llllllllllll 12y ago
In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships. And unfortunately social interaction is severely restricted and punished in K-12 education (in the US, which is the extent of my familiarity). I volunteered at an elementary school for a year, and the kids there had little opportunity to socialize freely. Recess and lunch were limited to a combined 40 minutes, including transition periods to and from the classroom. Gym/physical education was a "unit", only attended one week out of every three, and much like I remembered from my own schooling, more than half of that time is spent explaining the rules to some highly-structured, barely-constitutes-exercise activity.

capkutay 12y ago

This is partly attributed to 'No Child Left Behind'. The fact that public funding for schools is strictly determined by each school's performance on rigid, standardized tests is a huge issue. How can schools allow free-flowing learning, culture, exploration, and self direction when they HAVE to perform well on standardized tests?

barry-cotter 12y ago
This is bullshit. Sit down, shut up and do as you're told has been the primary and secondary school curriculum in most every mass school system everywhere. John Taylor Gatto wrote Seven Lessons long before No Child Left Behind. http://the7lessonteacher.com/ http://the7lessonteacher.com/

jiggy2011 12y ago

I don't know if self-direction is really a good idea. When I was a kid I would have directed myself towards video games and cartoons. I probably would not have independently developed an interest in english grammer and math.

glenra 12y ago
Video games and cartoons can be valuable learning experiences. We learn a lot through play. If you got into minecraft you'd be doing engineering. If you got into Wildstar or WoW or some other guild-based combat system you'd be learning leadership and social dynamics - how to keep a team together and happy - and also a certain amount of math. If you got into Quake-like games you might discover the modding community and get interested in learning how to be a level designer, a programmer, a visual artist, or an architect. Or take "watching cartoons". You might discover stop-motion and start making your own. Or if you got into Anime you might get interested in learning Japanese. The Sudbury schools emphasize the power of boredom. When you don't play videogames that much you might FEEL like you could play them all the time if allowed to. But if you were ACTUALLY allowed to, you'd eventually get bored and want to go deeper. And then you'd inevitably be learning stuff. A repeated discovery was that most kids eventually DO decide they want to learn math, in part because it's something other people can do that seems like it might be useful. And when kids are actually interested in the subject, they can learn it in a really TINY amount of contact hours and it doesn't harm them at all to have waited a few extra years. The reason standard schools waste so much time teaching math is that they're trying to force kids who aren't interested at all in learning it on the school's schedule rather than their own. As for "english grammar", you can learn that just by using some of your freed-up time to read lots of books. Here's a story that involves teaching 6 years of math in 20 hours of class time: http://sudburyschool.com/articles/free-last http://sudburyschool.com/articles/free-last
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  I think it might be wishful thinking to imagine that kids left to their own devices will identify and persue useful skills without adult guidance. Even if every kid who watches cartoons develops an interest in stop motion animation, how many stop motion animators do we need? How would you even understand how to start with quake modding without knowing basic math and reading comprehension? When I was at school there were kids who would frequently "unschool" themselves by skipping class, the interests they developed were mostly related to vandalism and other petty crime.

ekianjo 12y ago

> elementary school system in the west is that kids are given no room for self-direction To be fair this is happening not just in the West. Japan's education system is a disaster in itself which creates kids who stop asking questions after a couple of years. I let you imagine what you end up when they reach the state of adulthood.

dredericktatum 12y ago
Japan are part of the west. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I say 'the west', I'm not talking about geography. I mean cultures that value economic success above most everything else. Besides, they're only 'west' when the US is on the left side of your projection of the globe. It's a useful and well understood colloquialism so I use it. PS: I'm not saying economy is to blame, but the idea that there's exactly one way to be successful (make money in this case), given enough time and belief, will eventually devolve and create dysfunctional systems like those we see in schools today where individuality is quickly eroded because a 'higher' goal is being chased: pass your tests so you can progress to college (or whatever) and then become a success. Step one: learn the same stuff, in the same way as everyone else (in an environment that, by design or not, encourages conformity), step 2: ???, step 3: PROFIT.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  Japan is not really part of the West per se. There is still so much cultural legacy at work in the industry and politics, if its part of the West then its a very poor imitation of it. And lets not talk about the place of women in "westernized" Japan, lets not.
jiggy2011 12y ago
It doesn't seem to have hurt the Japanese ability to innovate in technology and culture too much though.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  Maybe you missed the fact Japan s economy has been in recession for the past 20 years or so. Its not so much a hotbed of technology anymore. Or if it is, they are clearly failing at making money with it.

bayesianhorse 12y ago

I'm all for making school more fun. But self-direction? Don't forget: these are children. Most (and certainly enough) of them won't have any natural inclination to learn even reading, writing and math. The whole point of having schools is to give an external sense of direction. I think schools need to be optimized and tuned, but please, please stop these extreme experiments.

Lalakh 12y ago
Having worked with much younger children for several years, I can assure you that most children start of with a natural inclination to learn how to read & understand math, just maybe not in the structured 'worksheet' type approach you see in some schools. A child that enjoys baking becomes naturally motivated to learn how to understand recipes, a child that is interested in computers & games wants to learn how to recognise the symbols that start their favourite game. It is all about finding the right motivation. For the even the most reluctant writers it can be about building up the necessary physical skills using less obvious means- lego, clay, eye droppers in the water area. Then instead of practising writing we are making road signs for our car game or writing a list of things to take on our outing. The point is when young children are given a supportive, no pressure approach that acknowledges & responds to their interests they do have a natural inclination to learn those skills and others. They just need adults that know how to facilitate & scaffold that learning. What is more important- that a child knows how to read by 4 or a child who learns at their own pace, and is far more likely to become someone who loves reading for pleasure?
nekopa 12y ago
Children don't necessarily want to learn,they want to do things. And sometimes their lack of knowledge stops them from doing what they want and therefore they become motivated to learn what they need to overcome that. These are other extreme experiments, and self guided learning has been used for quite a while and quite successfully (re montessori)
rapind 12y ago
I couldn't disagree more. My kids are only 2 and 3, but what they've learned has been entirely driven by their own interests. They learned to talk because not being able to communicate well is frustrating. They learned to walk because crawling everywhere is frustrating, etc. Not because I sat them down and said "OK, now it's time for our talking lesson". Why would this suddenly change? As a parent I think it's still your job to evaluate the things that are positive and negative and try to limit the negative influences, like TV or intentionally addictive video games (farmville, wow, etc.), but I don't see how this is at all related to school. School shouldn't be exempt from being scrutinized for it's positive or negative effects. When I finished school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. School classes bored the crap out of me for the most part, and not because I'm too smart (which I'm not), but because it just wasn't interesting. I had no practical or immediate use of the material being taught. I use to think I was deficient and had an attention deficit disorder. Occasionally a lesson would interest me and I would excel at it, but soon we'd move on to some other boring topic. Many years later, looking at my own day to day life, I am constantly learning. The things I learn have either a practical and immediate use, or they simply interest me. Many of the lessons in school I thought were boring would have interested me at some point in my life when they were more relevant. I wish I had started self-learning earlier.

Angostura 12y ago

I've got too kids in primary school in the UK, and my experiences are entirely different. They've gone through schools with lovely, kind, nuturing teachers who have instilled an interest in learning. My youngest daughter delights in maths puzzled and writing bizarre and gruesome stories, for which she has been awarded and praised. My eldest daughter as just finished primary and enjoyed all of it (apart from French) and the P.E teacher recently unearthed an apparent latent talent for cricket (I couldn't catch a ball if you asked me). Sweeping generalisations about any mode of education is bad. I was lucky in that my kids and school were well matched. But yes, we did also work hard to support the work of the school.

joelhooks 12y ago
Taking luck out of the equation was a primary reason for not sending any of our kids to school. You are right, you are lucky.

lostcolony 12y ago

Choice, but also, role models. How does a kid know they want to learn to read, except to see others reading? How does a kid know they want to learn math, except to see someone else able to solve a useful problem they had no idea could be solved? In a thread on income inequality, someone posited that the best indicator for economic success was whether a person was read to as a child. They meant it as a holistic indicator over a number of factors, and I think one large one is that it meant the child early on had a role model for education. I know for myself (anecdotal evidence, yeah yeah), I chafed very early on to learn to read, because my parents could and I couldn't. Similarly, early on, while I could figure out some kinds of math (the basic of multiplication by seeing arrangements of windows, "oh, three fours is twelve!", and then being given a toy that had the multiplication tables on opaque buttons that when pressed would show the answer, I recall other times when people were able to solve problems (long division, multiplication of 2 or more digit numbers) that I didn't know how to solve, and I -desperately- wanted to. For a friend, who came from a rural family whose only owned book was a Bible, largely unread, it was when I introduced him to video games (RPGs), and fantasy novels, that he really began to read, and actually to purchase books himself.

fchollet 12y ago
Completely agree --the fundamental problem to solve is that of motivation, and motivation will very often come from role models and mentors. The function of a mentor is not limited to providing an example of what can be learned and why it should be learned. A mentor should also directly provide motivation reenforcement whenever the kid shows progress on the right path. The best education will be self-direction in a culturally rich environment that rewards and celebrates learning and educative achievements.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Sure, self-directed. But then the support of a tutor is invaluable! Why let the poor kid flounder around, motivated but unskilled at learning? Show them the right path! Or at least all the options.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Learning can be hard. Kids love easy things. It takes direction, monitoring, pushing to get them to try to read, or do arithmetic, or master pretty much any delayed-gratification skill. Left on their own, kids will likely get a broad shallow education with one or two deep dives into subjects of dubious value.