Do you see the contradiction in your own statement? Teaching younger children is both too easy and too hard? Responsibility is the whole point. Yes, it's supposed to be a non-trivial challenge. That is part of why it's worth doing.
> education is more advanced than it was, say, 100 years ago.
Education is certainly more democratized now, but it's hard to identify any advances. Picking up a student textbook from 1900 is very eye opening.
Students today don't learn any math invented later than the 18th century. Though that is hardly the worst thing I can say about school math.
They study history in much the same way that students studied history two hundred years ago -- but without actually learning classical languages to read the original works.
They study literature and composition the same way it has been done for many generations. The canon that educated people are supposed to have read has shifted somewhat, but it is just different, not more complex.
The contents of their science books have updated somewhat, but the method sadly has not. Memorization of facts is still the norm -- the dried up husks of actual science.
The only true advance I see is the elimination of corporal punishment.
It's too much to assume that an average child can productively solve problems that are related to raising children with various family backgrounds. How to deal with shy or angry children, conflicts with the family members and so on. While I don't know how it's done everywhere in the world, contrast that to kindergarten teachers that have academic education with focus on teaching (including methods, subjects, psychology, and so on).
If you claim that education hasn't advanced in 100 years tremendously, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. For instance, think about the education of children with mental or learning disabilities. It has advanced a lot in my lifetime, too.
Our high school biology ends with relatively detailed information about DNA replication and sequencing using PCR that combines chemistry and physics. Physics includes nuclear physics and electrical engineering. Mathematics contains differential equations and statistics. Chemistry has topics going in to details of organic chemistry. Was Plato talking about those too?
If you feel that there's some problem in education that you can solve better, feel free to get a degree and write a thesis about that.
There will always be deviations from the mean, regardless of whether or not they are pathologized as behavioral disorders, which will slow down such attempts at synchronous learning.
This is why sense classical times the ultimate model for education has been that of the individual conversation, dialogue, between student and tutor.
We aren't using alternative methods outside of tutorship for education because we have discovered better methodologies, we are doing so because of economics and cost.
Expert tutors were formerly extremely scarce and retained by the nobility. We employ group lectures in packed classrooms not because they are a necessary or efficient way to learn, but because educated teachers used to be extremely scarce, and it gave everybody a chance to hear.
The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. They can also ask their peers who have better understanding of the topic. However, printing press made it possible to create text books that allow a lot more information to be learned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on.
As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be, and how much they affect groups of children at sensitive development stages.
Well, this assertion of impossibility is demonstrably and historically false, because since the times of Ancient Greece, that is how precisely how many people in the upper classes and great thinkers received their education.
It's also within the realm of economic possibility to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio today for most disciplines while simultaneously expanding education access.
You do it by only supplying lectures in the form of video recordings by the single foremost expert lecturer on that topic, drastically reducing non-tutoring related administrative expenditures and overheads, crowd-sourcing free tutors from all age groups and professional backgrounds including non-academics, and gradually replacing public education funding with a voucher system for parents to go out, find, and pay for the best and most academically qualified tutors and mentors for their children in a competitive education market.
A lecture which proceeds at a pacing not controlled by the individual, in which the learner cannot interrogate each and every claim and proposition at their own pace in the order it is presented, is largely a dramatic performance. It's little more than a motivational speech for them go out and acquire the knowledge on their own time, outside of lecture, at a future date.
Instead of having thousands of teachers perform daily motivational speeches on the same topic nationwide, you can just have the single best speaker on the topic make a single recording once every few years using modern technology, and pay all of those workers to expend their labor on performing 1:1 interaction to accelerate the rate of learning.
> You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions.
You cannot rationally judge the efficiency of an existing process in comparison to a proposed alternative by only observing the output of the existing one.
> The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions.
In a generalized form, dialogue is also conducted by learners internally through self questioning, and when engaging with an external medium which provides feedback (experimentation). It is a necessary experience for any learner to accept a new proposition as true, and something which one-to-many synchronous lectures are never directly capable of providing.
> earned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on.
Textbooks provide an essential aide for students engaged in self questioning to verify their answers, but as a static medium, they lack the ability to make predictions about what each learner is thinking based on observed behavioral cues like a tutor or peer can. Since static media cannot make efficient inferences about the individual based on reactive observation, it cannot tell each learner what they don't know they don't know.
Learning what you don't know you don't know is something which currently can only be efficiently achieved through conversation, and greatly accelerates the learning process.
> As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree.
I would not argue that the phenomena which pathologies describe does not objectively exist, only that the principle which distinguishes atypical behavior from pathological behavior is a normative distinction containing embedded social-political beliefs rather than a purely descriptive one. It's an optional distinction to make, based on whether it provides us any utility any achieving our goals.
>It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be
I have met children with severe learning disabilities and it is widely accepted among teachers and parents that they are benefitted by more 1:1 interaction and shouldn't be stuck in large classrooms. My point is simply that everybody learns faster with 1:1 interaction and learns slower in large classrooms.
There are people who mostly attend lectures and read little and do extremely well. There are also people who mostly read and attend few lectures and also do well. The more methods are available, the better the education.
My point in the context of children with learning disabilities was that they must be tended to by adults. I assume you are agreeing with that.
Education without this is like building a sandcastle. The brain is going to discard the information after the test if you aren't required to reexplain it the next year, and your foundations get eroded.
This "discarding after test" is already and automatically addressed in the education: high school repeats things learned in previous schools and builds on those. Our high schools also have large final exams that require one to be able to understand the whole curriculum of the subject. The grade measures your memory, and understanding because you cannot just memorise everything. The same is true for all education levels.
Under the principal of spaced repetition, you might also want people in the workforce infrequently tutoring college students, graduate students infrequently tutoring high school students, college students infrequently tutoring middle schoolers, so on and so forth.
The teacher-student heirarchy was decent way to mass produce educational services during industrialization but creates unnecessarily rigid classifications between learners at different levels of knowledge.
I think there is room for a more mutualistic exchange, between tutors who would like to clarify their existing knowledge, and between students who like to learn something new, to emerge in the future.
We are also having university "students" tutor younger people. These are called teachers and professors.
k-12 (13 yrs), Collage (4yrs), Med School(4 years), Residency (3 years), Specialty medical training (3yrs) = 28 years. Ignoring pre k and the fact that this is the happy path.
Residency starts out with extreme levels of supervision. The end of fellowship is the point where they are considered competent enough to not need direct supervision. Though doctors still have plenty of people looking over there shoulders.
The point is 32 is when doctors can start paying back significant amounts of there student loans and saving for retirement. Including interest it's not hard to be 32 and have 1/2 million in debt.
PS: Also, specialist's can't afford to make the path cheaper for the next person as they need to constrain supply to keep there wages high. Which not only increases cost of healthcare, but also medical research.
I've learned eg cycling from practical demonstrations of my slightly older cousins.
The counterpoint is that those teenagers suck because they missed out on years of practice because they were never given the opportunity to actually teach anyone anything meaningful before.
You are also presuming a high-stakes situation where mistakes are costly and go uncorrected forever. That is not realistic. Well-educated teachers are still vital, and a lesson gone bad presents even more teaching opportunities than a lesson gone well.
If an 8-year-old is helping a 6-year-old with math, then they are both learning, and the teacher is spending a lot less time watching either of them.
I think what we're seeing here is a general problem with outsourcing: you try to come up with a clean separation of responsibilities, but you end up with a costly mistake instead. In this case, thinking of all children as customers that are served by your employees, it would make a lot more sense to make it a collaborative effort between expert caregivers/teachers and students of various ages.
Offtopic, I can't help but wonder how much the tutoring reinforces what they were probably certain to forget anyway. In the same way that blogging about a subject reinforces your understanding of it (e.g., if you can't explain it, you don't know it), I suspect that tutoring a younger generation would help those tutors cement that knowledge more deeply into their minds than just retaining it long enough to pass whatever tests they're given in the short term.
At the end of the day though, your dojo analogy is most precise -- senseis don't just promote every student to assistant instructor. They carefully curate based on knowledge, discipline and behavior. Having every older child tutor the younger is probably unnecessary, and would likely lead to chaos, but if teachers chose only those students capable of helping out the younger children, even assuming some failure rate in selection, it would probably be a dramatic improvement over the current situation.