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Things Every Kid Should Master

206 points by wallflower 12y ago

s_henry_paulson 12y ago
#7 is arguably even the most important. If only administrators and those above them would be made to understand that there is more to child development than standardized test scores.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  Please don't say "#n is adjective..." without specifying what #n actually is. This is a clickbait trend that has ripped through social media spam lately and it's vastly annoying imo. If you're going to talk about the article, talk about it like a normal person, not a spammer trying to trick people into following the links. #7 in this article is "well-being".
- markbnj 12y ago
  My reaction was the opposite. Of course well-being is important, but it's a state isn't it? How do you learn it, or teach it? It sounds perilously close to the whole "self-esteem" thing that became prominent in elementary schools a few years back. As if self-esteem was not something developed through accomplishment and the subsequent increase in self-confidence, but rather a piece of information to be conveyed by an instructor. "Shazam! You now esteem yourself."
  - sp332 12y ago
    Lots of people with impressive accomplishments don't have self-esteem. Impostor Syndrome, Dunning-Kruger etc. If you don't have self-esteem, you'll let yourself get pushed around because you think you're not really worth anything. But with it, you'll start to see your own potential, which is a good motivator to start working toward it.
    - rustynails 12y ago
      Self esteem is a double edged sword as it does not consider empathy and may lead to narcissistic values. That's the flaw with the self only aspect.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    It's a state, but you can learn quite a bit on how to get and maintain that state. Things like "ecstacy/sex/[whatever] works short term, but maybe you should see a therapist instead" isn't something that goes without saying. Lots of people take the wrong choice every day.
  - Lancey 12y ago
    Well-being is a complicated topic, which only drives home why we need to teach it to children. Not only in respect to self-worth and work ethic, but in terms of empathy, morality, and the ability to rationalize the world around them. If we can help children think about why they feel the way they do, it can clear up confusion about the emotions of everyday life and prevent anxiety. If we do not, they'll simply have a more and more complicated world to deal with as they grow up, without the tools to help them simplify it.
  - Kluny 12y ago
    You can absolutely teach it. At the age of 25 I think I'm only now beginning to understand the specific actions and skills that go into making your life a good one. Skills like: coming up with ideas for ways to be kind to people, being truthful with myself and others, communicating my feelings and problems early and calmly (instead of too late and tearfully), eating well, keeping my environment clean, exercising enough, and managing my time by making sure I don't overcommit myself. I definitely didn't do most of these things when I was in school - looking back, I can see the useless, arrogant teenager I was, and want to slap myself. But honestly, no one bothered to teach me these skills, except (kind of, in a confusingly packaged, disorganized way) in Sunday school. I got the fundamental concepts of how to conduct myself properly by reading books, mostly fiction, and learned to apply them largely by observing adults for what NOT to do - it was also a long time before I learned to find good role models.
luxpir 12y ago
Was pleasantly surprised by the article. Turns out there's some excellent guidance for the new parent there, given that very few of us can expect these lifeskills to be taught at school; folks can at least take a stab at teaching these at home.
afarrell 12y ago
I would give anything right now to have had someone actually have taught me collaboration and conversation when I was a kid. I remember crying multiple nights in elementary school because I didn't have friends and didn't know how to work with people. At the very least, I wish I'd known about How to Win Friends and Influence People before high school.
- cpursley 12y ago
  Yeah, my parents always told me "hard work" was the answer but that's only half of the story.
- beat 12y ago
  Nice to see a shout out to the greatest book ever written on being a good conversationalist! "How to Win Friends and Influence People" ought to be required reading in high school. My wife struggles with introversion. She hates talking to strangers and non-friends, calls networking "schmoozing", and generally sees only the negative in meeting new people. I've tried to get her to read this book for years, but she fights me on it.
  - xtrumanx 12y ago
    I read that book and I've gotta say fans of it have really oversold it. It has some good advice but I found some tactics questionable due to appearing as insincere to me. I also find it weird that you characterize your wife's introversion as a struggle like introversion is some sort of abnormal condition. Some people just don't enjoy random conversations about random topics because randomness is usually not a great way to select for quality.
    - beat 12y ago
      Really? I thought sincerity in conversation was the entire point of the book! He says quite explicitly that if you're insincere, people will sense it and distrust you. As for my spouse... yes, it hurts her, and she's aware it hurts her. It limits her effectiveness as an artist, and it limits her career options. You can't "cure" introversion (it's not a disease, it's a personality), but you can compensate for it. And part of that is just cultivating internal attitudes - for example, not thinking of networking as something deceptive and selfish ("schmoozing"), but rather as something sincere and generous.
zamalek 12y ago
> Conversation I know barely any adults (late 20s, early 30s) who know how to do this. The concept of "conversationalist" is lost in modern society, you have to be watching whatever junk is on TV in order to communicate with people - god forbid you want to talk about something genuinely interesting.
- gavazzy 12y ago
  The problem is one of feedback. One who is extremely bad at conversation would likely be too socially unaware to recognize s/he is.
  - creshal 12y ago
    I wouldn't say that. I know I'm bad at conversation, and I'm always mildly awed when I see e.g. my parents striking up a half-hour long conversation with random strangers in trains. I still have no idea how they do it, and I don't see many people in my age range (20-30) able to do the same.
    - zamalek 12y ago
      The trick is to know a little about everything, which can be acquired by: * Reading from a variety of sources (HN does provide a lot of this, click on more than just the tech articles). * People in our age group seem to have more interest in being heard than interest in listening. Don't do that. Ask questions (which is in itself a good way to hold a conversation), even about things you wouldn't think you would be interested in. * Learn to at least listen to opinions that differ from your own. Big bonus if you can dedicate energy to contemplating those opinions. In addition: * Nobody wants to hear about Game of Thrones or the latest computer game that you play. Entertainment media rarely makes for good conversation unless you share the specific entertainment piece in question (mostly sport); however, you are doing little for your future conversation ability by participating in an echo chamber. * If you screw up people will probably forget about you, not remember you as an idiot. Don't be scared to practice on strangers. * Keep your bloody phone in your pocket and ignore it.
VLM 12y ago
"Why not test the things we value, and test them in a way that provides us with an accurate picture of what children really do, not what they can do under the most constrained circumstances after the most constrained test preparation?" Because the purpose of testing is to use it as a weapon to punish political opponents and brag about your own accomplishments. Also it can be used as a weapon to reduce funding, if you want to reduce funding and need to provide an acceptable theoretically 3rd party evaluated reason, ditto if you see firing people as an inherent good. Along the lines of security theater logic, the more painful and obnoxious and offensive the testing is, the better it must be and the more the school must care about kids, for a similar example see the logic behind corporal punishment in schools from decades past (we only beat the kids because we love them or somesuch nonsense). Finally if you carefully design racially biased tests or socioeconomic biased tests, then even a proud liberal can select the lilly white rich subdivision for their kids "because of the test scores" in an abstract public sense, not the highly politically incorrect race and income data. The analogy with security theater is the truly critical point from above. School testing exists to improve schools in exactly the same way TSA jackboots molesting women at airports improves security.
- me1010 12y ago
  I strongly disagree. The latest round of standardized testing, Common Core, is quite good. However, some schools and teachers and administrators will always act like: > TSA jackboots This doesn't mean that the testing or the test material is a bad idea.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  When speaking proper English and studying are looked down upon as something for "lilly white" people the game is already lost.
Delmania 12y ago
How about empathy and self control? How about humility? These 3 skills are sorely needed.
- mtbcoder 12y ago
  I very much agree with the Buddhist thought process that compassion, empathy are pivotal to well-being. I was a bit disappointed that these were absent from the list. In my opinion they are foundational in regards to points 4 through 7.
- bradbatt 12y ago
  Empathy is probably the greatest thing we could teach children or anyone for that matter. We do a very poor job in general of teaching emotional skills such as these in schools.
neonbat 12y ago
I think these things are hard to master. I think it's ambitious to ask children to master these things. I like this.
Lancey 12y ago
I feel like the writer doesn't fully understand how deep some of the flaws in our educational system can run. Take, for example, the section on collaboration which hints only at educator behavior influencing students to exclude others. There are so many other factors that would cause a child to segregate and organize themselves into cliques, and as much as our educators may impact the social structure of the students, the behaviors of parents, guardians, caretakers, and other adults in a student's life play just as important a role in their development, especially if students spend more time with them than their teachers. This issue extends beyond the scope of our education system and is not easily remedied through changes in the institution. Some of these habits may not be fixable. This isn't to say the article doesn't raise good points, especially that elementary and early school years should focus more on developing social skills than academic ones. However it fails to assess how varied children can be in terms of background, home life, opportunity, and development. Would it be fair to assess a student to whom English is a second language on the same scale as one that grew up in an English speaking country? Can we compare a student on the autistic spectrum with a socially and verbally mature student? The author makes these topics seem simpler than they actually are, and that hurts the message that they're trying to get across.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  good points, especially that elementary and early school years should focus more on developing social skills than academic ones. I hold that United States schools are stultifyingly boring for a great many pupils, because the lessons are too easy,[1] and as a consequence many pupils languish in their social development because they are not allowed the opportunity to pursue development of knowledge and skill while engaged in group work at school. One reason I think this is that I know a whole country, where my wife grew up, where most school pupils were instructed in school in a second language that they didn't speak at home[2] and where the school lessons were much more challenging. That seemed to produce better social results than have ever been found in United States schools. [1] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2012/07/10/11913/do-schools-challenge-our-students/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/201... [2] My wife is part of the majority population of Taiwan in her generation that grew up speaking Taiwanese at home but was only permitted to speak Mandarin at school. (Mandarin is approximately as different from Taiwanese as English is from German, or as Spanish is from French.) The school lessons in Taiwan were, and are, much more ambitious in promoting deep thinking than United States lessons are, and include a mandatory requirement to begin studying high-school-level algebra and geometry by seventh grade--even for below-average pupils. Oh, and of course school pupils all over the world begin study of modern foreign languages--usually English--by much earlier ages than most pupils in United States schools, even if they are going to school in a second language, as many school pupils do in many countries. United States schools are too wimpy academically to fully develop young people socially.
inanutshellus 12y ago
This article seems to be flame-bait for the standardized test world, rather than pointers on how to direct children. e.g. "If only our standardized tests measured this amorphous thing!" rather than "Here are tips for promoting [inquiry] in children". Looking at BG's comments show the article's content is ignored and instead is people blasting their opinion of the current state of educational reform.
- Lancey 12y ago
  I agree with this. By opening with a diatribe on standardized tests, and focusing on assessing skills that are inherently difficult to assess, Engel moves the discussion from helping children to condemning our education system (it's bad, but this article shouldn't be about testing or schools at all).
  - 300bps 12y ago
    By opening with a diatribe on standardized tests, and focusing on assessing skills that are inherently difficult to assess, Engel moves the discussion from helping children to condemning our education system Exactly. The article just comes across as so silly. Take this part: There are several ways we might measure a child’s disposition to inquire. We can easily record the number of questions the child asks during a given stretch of time. It's been a while since I've been in a classroom but I would probably jump out the window if every class period each student had to get their average 1.4 questions in to maintain their grade. It's like the article writer lives in a fantasy world.
seanfchan 12y ago
The traits that we should be testing for in this article are great but what do you think it would take to adopt this type of testing? It seems like public school are stuck continuing with the current tests because these tests are used to procure federal/state funding. For schools to change, the country's consciousness needs to change about how society defines a "well rounded" individual
astrodust 12y ago
Nothing about being a creator rather than a pure consumer? Too many are caught up in the cycle of chasing grades and completely forget what the point of an education is supposed to be.
- beat 12y ago
  What is the point of education? Not the point of learning, but the point of schools and degrees and such? One could argue that it's mostly about learning obedience, how to worship the clock, and how to tolerate doing things that are arbitrary and stupid. School isn't to make us good people. It's to make us good employees.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    You're confusing education with schooling. They are not the same, as much as their equivalence has been deeply ingrained as a public axiom. I do agree, otherwise. Schooling has an orthogonal purpose to education at large, even though individual schooling systems might have higher educational value than others.
    - beat 12y ago
      Actually, I was trying to de-confuse them. Formal education and learning are often conflated, which leads to cognitive dissonance when education doesn't equate to effective learning.
  - rapala 12y ago
    But all that math, biology and stuff, that has nothing to do about beeing a "good employee". There's a lot of things that the school system genuinely tries to teach. To me it seems that those life skills are an added bonus. Some of them are also requirements to mass teaching. For example, every needs to be at the same place at the same time. That beeing said, mass teaching like we do it might not be the best thing. We have tools to facilitate teaching that for example does not require everyone to be at the same physical location. Those same tools could also be better utilized in work to enable remote work. Which would then mean one less life skill to teach at school.
omegote 12y ago
Boom, I was expecting to find "Programming, every kid should know how to program" at any point in the article. Glad I didn't.
germinalphrase 12y ago
I find it encouraging that we're starting to discuss skills that allow young people to teach themselves rather than remaining reliant on guidance of others. Some of the skills discussed in this article are difficult to instruct in an educational setting (though they can certainly be structurally reinforced) - but I see far too many young people who see 'education' as a task to be completed/survived rather than a series of personal skills they will need/want to apply to life at large. The comments about testing aren't particularly interesting (as other commenters have pointed out) - but we should certainly be aware of the distorting effects of high stakes testing on the values/goals of our schools.
- sogen 12y ago
  "Dumbing us Down" by John Gatto is a great eye opener about schooling and how schools are great at killing creativity.
kleer001 12y ago
Misleading title. Should have been "Things every child educator should master." Children should be children, it's the adults that are messing up.
jff 12y ago
"Testing these concrete things is bad, let's instead attempt to test these poorly-defined subjective things."
senthil_rajasek 12y ago
play
qnaal 12y ago
Where does "who invented the cotton gin" fit into all this?
kenjackson 12y ago
My son is six and I take him to school each day (its about 25 minutes). He started asking me to tell him stories on the way to school, so I told him stories about how I was a spy and the missions I went on. Eventually I put him in my stories too -- he was member of the Omega Force. At some point he didn't like how his character was acting in the story, so he began to tell me what his character should do. Well over the course of about a month we now do a full on role-playing game on the way to school. The level of role playing matches nearly anything I did when I played D&D. He now leads the Omega Force and I lead the Alpha Force. His squad is larger, but mine is more specialized. That 25 minutes of rather sophisticated verbal interaction is pretty incredible. I can weave in interesting scenarios and discussions, and the level of engagement is great. I have no data to support it, but I feel like its something that almost every kindergartner could benefit from.
- charliepark 12y ago
  I did something similar when I drove my daughters to school a few years ago. The story and characters were different (in our case, woodland creatures having adventures), but the overall idea — and, it seems, many of the benefits — were similar. One of the great outcomes of it was that when my wife or I heard the girls say interesting things about their social dynamics at school (another child getting picked on, kids with "fancy shoes", questions about kids with different-colored skin, a new kid to the school, etc.), I could weave those situations into the narrative. It gave us a safe space to explore the issues, and to help the girls process various lessons in an enjoyable way. Eventually, we moved on to audiobooks and then the girls reading to themselves. But what started out as frustration at a "long" commute ended up being one of the highlights of the day.
- ngoel36 12y ago
  You should have him write down his thoughts as well - it sounds like his story development and verbal communication skills are getting a bunch of work, would be awesome to have his written communication match
  - kenjackson 12y ago
johnchristopher 12y ago
I am surprised about the lack of math/algebra emphasis.
neumino 12y ago
Empathy is probably the most important thing kids should learn.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
> The educational philosopher Harry Brighouse has suggested that the ability to think about something for 20 minutes at a time (sustained focus) may be one of the most powerful cognitive skills we acquire in school. What school did this guy attend? The one I was sent to as a child was little more than a zoo. If anyone left there able to concentrate for 20 minutes (myself included), it had nothing to do with the curriculum, the teaching methodology, or even the values espoused by the teachers and administration.
slimetree 12y ago
This is an excellent thought experiment I genuinely wish were reality. That said, the root problem with standardized tests is that they're inherently hackable. Standardized tests are like desktop software: you write once and ship everywhere, and once you do people start reverse engineering it. Any sufficiently hackable test will appear to work in the short-term if you just place it in front of admission to prestige, because of the large subset of high-achieving people whose lives' missions are to game any test placed in front of them, which drastically skews how well the test appears to predict achievement. The things mentioned in the article are excellent things to test, but if you start measuring e.g. the number and type of of questions a kid asks within x minutes, cram schools will just adapt, and in a few years you'll hit the end of another cycle.
davidbanham 12y ago
This is a great start and very well intentioned. I worry that all of the assessment methods, though, are very geared towards extroverts. A shy kid just won't perform well on most of those metrics. If a kid isn't comfortable with the tester, they'll be unlikely to pepper them with questions. Now, we should _definitely_ be trying to give that shy kid the tools they need to deal with that situation. In-person collaboration and meeting new people is a vital skill. We can't let our entire testing regime be blocked behind that skill, though.

206 points by wallflower 12y ago

#7 is arguably even the most important. If only administrators and those above them would be made to understand that there is more to child development than standardized test scores.

cookiecaper 12y ago
Please don't say "#n is adjective..." without specifying what #n actually is. This is a clickbait trend that has ripped through social media spam lately and it's vastly annoying imo. If you're going to talk about the article, talk about it like a normal person, not a spammer trying to trick people into following the links. #7 in this article is "well-being".
markbnj 12y ago
My reaction was the opposite. Of course well-being is important, but it's a state isn't it? How do you learn it, or teach it? It sounds perilously close to the whole "self-esteem" thing that became prominent in elementary schools a few years back. As if self-esteem was not something developed through accomplishment and the subsequent increase in self-confidence, but rather a piece of information to be conveyed by an instructor. "Shazam! You now esteem yourself."
- sp332 12y ago
  Lots of people with impressive accomplishments don't have self-esteem. Impostor Syndrome, Dunning-Kruger etc. If you don't have self-esteem, you'll let yourself get pushed around because you think you're not really worth anything. But with it, you'll start to see your own potential, which is a good motivator to start working toward it.
  - rustynails 12y ago
    Self esteem is a double edged sword as it does not consider empathy and may lead to narcissistic values. That's the flaw with the self only aspect.
- tormeh 12y ago
  It's a state, but you can learn quite a bit on how to get and maintain that state. Things like "ecstacy/sex/[whatever] works short term, but maybe you should see a therapist instead" isn't something that goes without saying. Lots of people take the wrong choice every day.
- Lancey 12y ago
  Well-being is a complicated topic, which only drives home why we need to teach it to children. Not only in respect to self-worth and work ethic, but in terms of empathy, morality, and the ability to rationalize the world around them. If we can help children think about why they feel the way they do, it can clear up confusion about the emotions of everyday life and prevent anxiety. If we do not, they'll simply have a more and more complicated world to deal with as they grow up, without the tools to help them simplify it.
- Kluny 12y ago
  You can absolutely teach it. At the age of 25 I think I'm only now beginning to understand the specific actions and skills that go into making your life a good one. Skills like: coming up with ideas for ways to be kind to people, being truthful with myself and others, communicating my feelings and problems early and calmly (instead of too late and tearfully), eating well, keeping my environment clean, exercising enough, and managing my time by making sure I don't overcommit myself. I definitely didn't do most of these things when I was in school - looking back, I can see the useless, arrogant teenager I was, and want to slap myself. But honestly, no one bothered to teach me these skills, except (kind of, in a confusingly packaged, disorganized way) in Sunday school. I got the fundamental concepts of how to conduct myself properly by reading books, mostly fiction, and learned to apply them largely by observing adults for what NOT to do - it was also a long time before I learned to find good role models.

luxpir 12y ago

Was pleasantly surprised by the article. Turns out there's some excellent guidance for the new parent there, given that very few of us can expect these lifeskills to be taught at school; folks can at least take a stab at teaching these at home.

afarrell 12y ago

I would give anything right now to have had someone actually have taught me collaboration and conversation when I was a kid. I remember crying multiple nights in elementary school because I didn't have friends and didn't know how to work with people. At the very least, I wish I'd known about How to Win Friends and Influence People before high school.

cpursley 12y ago
Yeah, my parents always told me "hard work" was the answer but that's only half of the story.
beat 12y ago
Nice to see a shout out to the greatest book ever written on being a good conversationalist! "How to Win Friends and Influence People" ought to be required reading in high school. My wife struggles with introversion. She hates talking to strangers and non-friends, calls networking "schmoozing", and generally sees only the negative in meeting new people. I've tried to get her to read this book for years, but she fights me on it.
- xtrumanx 12y ago
  I read that book and I've gotta say fans of it have really oversold it. It has some good advice but I found some tactics questionable due to appearing as insincere to me. I also find it weird that you characterize your wife's introversion as a struggle like introversion is some sort of abnormal condition. Some people just don't enjoy random conversations about random topics because randomness is usually not a great way to select for quality.
  - beat 12y ago
    Really? I thought sincerity in conversation was the entire point of the book! He says quite explicitly that if you're insincere, people will sense it and distrust you. As for my spouse... yes, it hurts her, and she's aware it hurts her. It limits her effectiveness as an artist, and it limits her career options. You can't "cure" introversion (it's not a disease, it's a personality), but you can compensate for it. And part of that is just cultivating internal attitudes - for example, not thinking of networking as something deceptive and selfish ("schmoozing"), but rather as something sincere and generous.

zamalek 12y ago

> Conversation I know barely any adults (late 20s, early 30s) who know how to do this. The concept of "conversationalist" is lost in modern society, you have to be watching whatever junk is on TV in order to communicate with people - god forbid you want to talk about something genuinely interesting.

gavazzy 12y ago
The problem is one of feedback. One who is extremely bad at conversation would likely be too socially unaware to recognize s/he is.
- creshal 12y ago
  I wouldn't say that. I know I'm bad at conversation, and I'm always mildly awed when I see e.g. my parents striking up a half-hour long conversation with random strangers in trains. I still have no idea how they do it, and I don't see many people in my age range (20-30) able to do the same.
  - zamalek 12y ago
    The trick is to know a little about everything, which can be acquired by: * Reading from a variety of sources (HN does provide a lot of this, click on more than just the tech articles). * People in our age group seem to have more interest in being heard than interest in listening. Don't do that. Ask questions (which is in itself a good way to hold a conversation), even about things you wouldn't think you would be interested in. * Learn to at least listen to opinions that differ from your own. Big bonus if you can dedicate energy to contemplating those opinions. In addition: * Nobody wants to hear about Game of Thrones or the latest computer game that you play. Entertainment media rarely makes for good conversation unless you share the specific entertainment piece in question (mostly sport); however, you are doing little for your future conversation ability by participating in an echo chamber. * If you screw up people will probably forget about you, not remember you as an idiot. Don't be scared to practice on strangers. * Keep your bloody phone in your pocket and ignore it.

VLM 12y ago

"Why not test the things we value, and test them in a way that provides us with an accurate picture of what children really do, not what they can do under the most constrained circumstances after the most constrained test preparation?" Because the purpose of testing is to use it as a weapon to punish political opponents and brag about your own accomplishments. Also it can be used as a weapon to reduce funding, if you want to reduce funding and need to provide an acceptable theoretically 3rd party evaluated reason, ditto if you see firing people as an inherent good. Along the lines of security theater logic, the more painful and obnoxious and offensive the testing is, the better it must be and the more the school must care about kids, for a similar example see the logic behind corporal punishment in schools from decades past (we only beat the kids because we love them or somesuch nonsense). Finally if you carefully design racially biased tests or socioeconomic biased tests, then even a proud liberal can select the lilly white rich subdivision for their kids "because of the test scores" in an abstract public sense, not the highly politically incorrect race and income data. The analogy with security theater is the truly critical point from above. School testing exists to improve schools in exactly the same way TSA jackboots molesting women at airports improves security.

me1010 12y ago
I strongly disagree. The latest round of standardized testing, Common Core, is quite good. However, some schools and teachers and administrators will always act like: > TSA jackboots This doesn't mean that the testing or the test material is a bad idea.
happyscrappy 12y ago
When speaking proper English and studying are looked down upon as something for "lilly white" people the game is already lost.

Delmania 12y ago

How about empathy and self control? How about humility? These 3 skills are sorely needed.

mtbcoder 12y ago
I very much agree with the Buddhist thought process that compassion, empathy are pivotal to well-being. I was a bit disappointed that these were absent from the list. In my opinion they are foundational in regards to points 4 through 7.
bradbatt 12y ago
Empathy is probably the greatest thing we could teach children or anyone for that matter. We do a very poor job in general of teaching emotional skills such as these in schools.

neonbat 12y ago

I think these things are hard to master. I think it's ambitious to ask children to master these things. I like this.

Lancey 12y ago

I feel like the writer doesn't fully understand how deep some of the flaws in our educational system can run. Take, for example, the section on collaboration which hints only at educator behavior influencing students to exclude others. There are so many other factors that would cause a child to segregate and organize themselves into cliques, and as much as our educators may impact the social structure of the students, the behaviors of parents, guardians, caretakers, and other adults in a student's life play just as important a role in their development, especially if students spend more time with them than their teachers. This issue extends beyond the scope of our education system and is not easily remedied through changes in the institution. Some of these habits may not be fixable. This isn't to say the article doesn't raise good points, especially that elementary and early school years should focus more on developing social skills than academic ones. However it fails to assess how varied children can be in terms of background, home life, opportunity, and development. Would it be fair to assess a student to whom English is a second language on the same scale as one that grew up in an English speaking country? Can we compare a student on the autistic spectrum with a socially and verbally mature student? The author makes these topics seem simpler than they actually are, and that hurts the message that they're trying to get across.

tokenadult 12y ago
good points, especially that elementary and early school years should focus more on developing social skills than academic ones. I hold that United States schools are stultifyingly boring for a great many pupils, because the lessons are too easy,[1] and as a consequence many pupils languish in their social development because they are not allowed the opportunity to pursue development of knowledge and skill while engaged in group work at school. One reason I think this is that I know a whole country, where my wife grew up, where most school pupils were instructed in school in a second language that they didn't speak at home[2] and where the school lessons were much more challenging. That seemed to produce better social results than have ever been found in United States schools. [1] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2012/07/10/11913/do-schools-challenge-our-students/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/201... [2] My wife is part of the majority population of Taiwan in her generation that grew up speaking Taiwanese at home but was only permitted to speak Mandarin at school. (Mandarin is approximately as different from Taiwanese as English is from German, or as Spanish is from French.) The school lessons in Taiwan were, and are, much more ambitious in promoting deep thinking than United States lessons are, and include a mandatory requirement to begin studying high-school-level algebra and geometry by seventh grade--even for below-average pupils. Oh, and of course school pupils all over the world begin study of modern foreign languages--usually English--by much earlier ages than most pupils in United States schools, even if they are going to school in a second language, as many school pupils do in many countries. United States schools are too wimpy academically to fully develop young people socially.

inanutshellus 12y ago

This article seems to be flame-bait for the standardized test world, rather than pointers on how to direct children. e.g. "If only our standardized tests measured this amorphous thing!" rather than "Here are tips for promoting [inquiry] in children". Looking at BG's comments show the article's content is ignored and instead is people blasting their opinion of the current state of educational reform.

Lancey 12y ago
I agree with this. By opening with a diatribe on standardized tests, and focusing on assessing skills that are inherently difficult to assess, Engel moves the discussion from helping children to condemning our education system (it's bad, but this article shouldn't be about testing or schools at all).
- 300bps 12y ago
  By opening with a diatribe on standardized tests, and focusing on assessing skills that are inherently difficult to assess, Engel moves the discussion from helping children to condemning our education system Exactly. The article just comes across as so silly. Take this part: There are several ways we might measure a child’s disposition to inquire. We can easily record the number of questions the child asks during a given stretch of time. It's been a while since I've been in a classroom but I would probably jump out the window if every class period each student had to get their average 1.4 questions in to maintain their grade. It's like the article writer lives in a fantasy world.

seanfchan 12y ago

The traits that we should be testing for in this article are great but what do you think it would take to adopt this type of testing? It seems like public school are stuck continuing with the current tests because these tests are used to procure federal/state funding. For schools to change, the country's consciousness needs to change about how society defines a "well rounded" individual

astrodust 12y ago

Nothing about being a creator rather than a pure consumer? Too many are caught up in the cycle of chasing grades and completely forget what the point of an education is supposed to be.

beat 12y ago
What is the point of education? Not the point of learning, but the point of schools and degrees and such? One could argue that it's mostly about learning obedience, how to worship the clock, and how to tolerate doing things that are arbitrary and stupid. School isn't to make us good people. It's to make us good employees.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  You're confusing education with schooling. They are not the same, as much as their equivalence has been deeply ingrained as a public axiom. I do agree, otherwise. Schooling has an orthogonal purpose to education at large, even though individual schooling systems might have higher educational value than others.
  - beat 12y ago
    Actually, I was trying to de-confuse them. Formal education and learning are often conflated, which leads to cognitive dissonance when education doesn't equate to effective learning.
- rapala 12y ago
  But all that math, biology and stuff, that has nothing to do about beeing a "good employee". There's a lot of things that the school system genuinely tries to teach. To me it seems that those life skills are an added bonus. Some of them are also requirements to mass teaching. For example, every needs to be at the same place at the same time. That beeing said, mass teaching like we do it might not be the best thing. We have tools to facilitate teaching that for example does not require everyone to be at the same physical location. Those same tools could also be better utilized in work to enable remote work. Which would then mean one less life skill to teach at school.

omegote 12y ago

Boom, I was expecting to find "Programming, every kid should know how to program" at any point in the article. Glad I didn't.

germinalphrase 12y ago

I find it encouraging that we're starting to discuss skills that allow young people to teach themselves rather than remaining reliant on guidance of others. Some of the skills discussed in this article are difficult to instruct in an educational setting (though they can certainly be structurally reinforced) - but I see far too many young people who see 'education' as a task to be completed/survived rather than a series of personal skills they will need/want to apply to life at large. The comments about testing aren't particularly interesting (as other commenters have pointed out) - but we should certainly be aware of the distorting effects of high stakes testing on the values/goals of our schools.

sogen 12y ago
"Dumbing us Down" by John Gatto is a great eye opener about schooling and how schools are great at killing creativity.

kleer001 12y ago

Misleading title. Should have been "Things every child educator should master." Children should be children, it's the adults that are messing up.

jff 12y ago

"Testing these concrete things is bad, let's instead attempt to test these poorly-defined subjective things."

senthil_rajasek 12y ago

play

qnaal 12y ago

Where does "who invented the cotton gin" fit into all this?

kenjackson 12y ago

My son is six and I take him to school each day (its about 25 minutes). He started asking me to tell him stories on the way to school, so I told him stories about how I was a spy and the missions I went on. Eventually I put him in my stories too -- he was member of the Omega Force. At some point he didn't like how his character was acting in the story, so he began to tell me what his character should do. Well over the course of about a month we now do a full on role-playing game on the way to school. The level of role playing matches nearly anything I did when I played D&D. He now leads the Omega Force and I lead the Alpha Force. His squad is larger, but mine is more specialized. That 25 minutes of rather sophisticated verbal interaction is pretty incredible. I can weave in interesting scenarios and discussions, and the level of engagement is great. I have no data to support it, but I feel like its something that almost every kindergartner could benefit from.

charliepark 12y ago
I did something similar when I drove my daughters to school a few years ago. The story and characters were different (in our case, woodland creatures having adventures), but the overall idea — and, it seems, many of the benefits — were similar. One of the great outcomes of it was that when my wife or I heard the girls say interesting things about their social dynamics at school (another child getting picked on, kids with "fancy shoes", questions about kids with different-colored skin, a new kid to the school, etc.), I could weave those situations into the narrative. It gave us a safe space to explore the issues, and to help the girls process various lessons in an enjoyable way. Eventually, we moved on to audiobooks and then the girls reading to themselves. But what started out as frustration at a "long" commute ended up being one of the highlights of the day.
ngoel36 12y ago
You should have him write down his thoughts as well - it sounds like his story development and verbal communication skills are getting a bunch of work, would be awesome to have his written communication match
- kenjackson 12y ago

johnchristopher 12y ago

I am surprised about the lack of math/algebra emphasis.

neumino 12y ago

Empathy is probably the most important thing kids should learn.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

> The educational philosopher Harry Brighouse has suggested that the ability to think about something for 20 minutes at a time (sustained focus) may be one of the most powerful cognitive skills we acquire in school. What school did this guy attend? The one I was sent to as a child was little more than a zoo. If anyone left there able to concentrate for 20 minutes (myself included), it had nothing to do with the curriculum, the teaching methodology, or even the values espoused by the teachers and administration.

slimetree 12y ago

This is an excellent thought experiment I genuinely wish were reality. That said, the root problem with standardized tests is that they're inherently hackable. Standardized tests are like desktop software: you write once and ship everywhere, and once you do people start reverse engineering it. Any sufficiently hackable test will appear to work in the short-term if you just place it in front of admission to prestige, because of the large subset of high-achieving people whose lives' missions are to game any test placed in front of them, which drastically skews how well the test appears to predict achievement. The things mentioned in the article are excellent things to test, but if you start measuring e.g. the number and type of of questions a kid asks within x minutes, cram schools will just adapt, and in a few years you'll hit the end of another cycle.

davidbanham 12y ago

This is a great start and very well intentioned. I worry that all of the assessment methods, though, are very geared towards extroverts. A shy kid just won't perform well on most of those metrics. If a kid isn't comfortable with the tester, they'll be unlikely to pepper them with questions. Now, we should _definitely_ be trying to give that shy kid the tools they need to deal with that situation. In-person collaboration and meeting new people is a vital skill. We can't let our entire testing regime be blocked behind that skill, though.