The examined life | Hacker News Reader

The examined life

aeon.co

39 pointssergeant332 comments

It seems to be describing a classroom ideal for extroverts. But already education is hugely social - much more than it used to be. Schools have loads of group work, universities have group work, schools (here in the UK) increasingly teach via shared activities, acting things out, debating things, etc - in this country the whole national "curriculum for excellence" is based around this.

Even in my job every training course I have been to lately involves "workshops" and group activities to play-act scenarios.

But some people hate learning like this. I'd much rather have a lecture or be given a book and just directly absorb the information without all the patronising and time-wasting group nonsense. I feel like modern education is actively hostile to individual reflection and deep learning.

I'm as introverted as they come, and the only way these group discussions have been effective for me is if you have a quorum of engaged students. For myself, the only way I've found to be engaged is by preparing for group discussion by doing individual reflection myself. (Either by reading relevant material or just by setting my mind to think about the topic for 30 minutes.)

What I'm trying to say is that I believe group discussions depend on individual reflection to work. For the introverts among us, group discussions can be more draining, but I've still typically found them quite helpful. Especially when the group is small (~5 or fewer).

There's a lot of research that shows these open and collaborative environments help kids learn. We can't really dispute that, but I'd be inclined to believe that is because the majority of people are extroverts in the first place.

There is another trend of personalizing, tailoring education for each individual student where this would be less of an issue. Hopefully technology makes it more feasible.

>There's a lot of research that shows these open and collaborative environments help kids learn.

Compared to what?

Compared to the more classical lecturer at the chalkboard classrooms.

Take my opinion with a pinch of salt as my only experience is my own high school education in the UK. My gripe is that you dont learn life skills. You dont learn things like the difference between a debit and a credit card, how a mortgage works, how to pay bills, learning to cook for yourself, how to do extremely basic car/home maintenance (changing bulbs, refitting plugs, etc), how to budget and save money, what happens if a family member dies, signing contracts and what your obligations are (eg, a mobile phone contract, a rental lease), and on and on.

The age old example is Pythagoras theorem, i got taught that at school and have never used it. Anyway, enough of my rant, i'd just like to see young people more prepared for the world, the opportunity is there and we're squandering it.

> The age old example is Pythagoras theorem, i got taught that at school and have never used it.

Personally I think this is a toxic attitude toward learning and one of the worst examples. The Pythagorean theorem is fundamental to geometry. If you had done any sort of engineering it would be a standard part of your job. Same for architecture and construction. A lot of DIY projects use it. Even understanding dimensions of a monitor.

I do agree that general life skills should be part of a standard highschool education, but your example of what is useless does not apply to a technical workforce.

Aside from the usefulness of the theorem, the point generally isn't to teach you to use the theorem itself. Rather, it is to teach basic algebra. It is one of the first introductions to "hey, you can equate two quantities and that equation has an application to reality." In that respect, the skills you develop learning -- working with -- the pythagorean theorem apply to half of the "life skills" in your example. A budget, mortgage and cooking ratios all have simple equations governing their application.

It is way past time we as a society move beyond the grammar school "i'll never use this" excuse about learning.

A far better example would have been trigonometry, or the quadratic formula, or the belligerents of the war of 1812. All of them fascinating subjects, but unlike, say, arithmetic, or compound interest, or a basic understanding of your country's legal system, they are not critical to survival in the modern world. Not to mention that thanks to teach-to-the-standardized-test, students are are criminally underserved in their exposure to them.

I think what most people would define as the "Common Core" of education should be greatly reduced. Instead of keeping students busy by teaching only the very basics of a topic (Oftentimes these basics are also wrong - precisely because there isn't time to dive into the nuances), and then testing them on the memorization of what ends up being largely pointless trivia, we should be taking that time, and push them towards deeper, focused study of subjects that interest them.

If you want to become an engineer, the standard K-12 mathematical education will suit you poorly. If you want to become a photographer, it will also suit you poorly, for entirely different reasons.

The quadratic formula is a far more pertinent example. Every graphing calculator and computer can calculate the solutions that the quadratic formula provides, without needing to have kids memorize and apply it manually. Yet we test students on memorizing and applying it mechanically without computers or calculators, despite how abundant they are in the real world.

Perhaps the best course I had in high school -- and it was an elective that I sort of fell into -- was a personal finance course, covering things like balancing a checkbook, filing income taxes, keeping a personal budget, etc.

In The Children's Machine, Seymour Paper wrote:

[O]n my reckoning, the fraction of human knowledge that is in the [school] curriculum is well under a millionth and diminishing fast. I simply cannot escape from the question: Why that millionth in particular?

On the other hand I wish I had more technical classes. I never found that life skill stuff to be that hard to figure out on my own.

Really? Is it the place of school to teach you the basic life skills that you might expect people to learn from their families?

I feel like it is a mistake to assume all families will teach (or know) these skills. It seems like that assumption could perpetuate inequality. I was fortunate enough to be raised by two parents in a stable environment but that wasn't the case for some of my friends and cousins. They ask me for advice on buying a car, getting a mortgage, building credit, investing, etc. Some don't even understand why you would save money ("Isn't that what social security is for?"). They call me "the adult" but I was just lucky enough to have a father familiar with these concepts and willing to talk about them.

Parents and families are not always brimming with the time or energy or knowledge needed.

Where do you draw the line between basic life skills that schools ought to teach you and the skills that parents should teach you? And why is the idea of overlap a bad one?

How do you clearly divide this list into scholastic and familial responsibility, such that most people (let's say in America) will agree to it?

* English

* Literature

* History

* Rhetoric

* Civics

* Health education

* Sex education

* Mathematics

* Chemistry

* Physics

* Music

* Economics

Isn't it already divided? School doesn't teach you how to wash dishes or ride a bike or light a fire. Your parents are unlikely to teach you geometry. I didn't mean to say that an overlap is a bad thing, rather that societies provide many ways of learning, and school can't teach you everything.

If you don't know how to do something it's not necessarily school's fault, and the solution isn't necessarily "more school"

I'm not saying it's not; I'm asking whether the relatively arbitrary line as it is currently drawn makes sense, and how hard we should all be wringing our hands about schools not preparing our children for the real world slash intruding on traditional family tasks or whatever.

> The age old example is Pythagoras theorem, i got taught that at school and have never used it. Anyway, enough of my rant, i'd just like to see young people more prepared for the world, the opportunity is there and we're squandering it.

And you resent that at some level? It's a beautiful and interesting thing that's true about the universe, and it's easy to learn. I would be horrified to learn that high-schoolers from 2050 generally didn't know the Pythagorean Theorem.

I agree at some level that more directly applicable knowledge could be useful and even engaging, but it's important to remember that we're imprisoning kids in a building for 8 hours a day. Do we really need to spend most of that time learning menial, boring tasks too? Let's not kill their youthful spirit before it gets out of the gate..

> Pythagoras theorem

I was with you up until this. What, man? Really? It seems that every time I enter any field of engineering or design whatsoever I have to use that theorem at some point. Even many of my past hobbies have utilized it. Good carpenters use it constantly.

So? Photographers have to learn how to use Photoshop, because it's relevant to their industry. That doesn't mean everyone else should have to learn how to use it.

That's not a good analogy. Photoshop is a specific tool, specific to one industry. I think a better analogy would be something like the concept of negative space, or color theory.

>do what Socrates did: sitting with his students, asking questions and, through dialogue, teaching them what matters most

Nonsensical comparison. Socrates' pupils came to him. They weren't herded into daycare and expected to act like calm but enthusiastic scholars of random subjects.

Furthermore, nobody knows which knowledge matters most to other people. It's a conceit to pretend otherwise. I suspect Socrates would have been the first to admit this.

>sitting with his students

Additionally, much of his teaching was done while walking, rather than having students sit still in rows.

Also, most teachers aren't Socrates. Policy-wise, the available levers are things like curriculum, teacher training, and incentives. School has to be designed for the actual inhabitants.

The course listed here is in philosophy. I teach college Math so I thought I'd mention, for the many tech-ish folks here, that there is a lot of interest in Math in classrooms of this kind, where active exploration is a prime goal.

For instance, I teach a intro to proofs course (out of a book I wrote, http://joshua.smcvt.edu/proofs) where students are given the definitions and theorems on the first day, and where the class consists of discussions that come to prove those results.

It seems to me that students learn the material better, in part because they hear things that seem good but that more discussion shows are wrong and so they come to appreciate better what is right. I find this style of teaching to be a very good fit for this class because I like for future teachers of math to have a feel for what is not right as well as what is right. But, I admit, we don't cover as much material.

This style is called Inquiry-Based, or Discovery-Based, or sometimes Moore Method (it has lots of variants). If you are interested then you can google any of those terms, or you could visit http://www.jiblm.org/, the Journal of Inquiry-Based Learning in Mathematics, for a collection of texts for various courses.

> The atmosphere in the [ideal] class is relaxed, collaborative, enquiring; learning is driven by curiosity and personal interest.

If this sort of environment is appealing to anyone, feel free to contact me via the email address listed on my profile. I've set up an intellectual community (composed of all different types, ranging from lit majors to lawyers to educators to musicians) on Slack that discusses, among many other topics, issues like this (i.e., effective pedagogy and epistemology). Changing education is something we're all passionate about, and we're always hungry for new knowledge/perspectives.

"The world over, the joy of learning is being sucked out and education reduced to a dry, soulless process of ‘delivery’ dictated by the demands of standardised tests"

Heh, a few word changes and this applies to programming too :-)

Some say 'knowledge is power'. Knowledge is great. But it is not 'wisdom', which tends to come from shared thoughts and experience.

I saw a comment here on HN once on a related subject that essentially said, (paraphrasing), "When wisdom is seen as a basic human need like food or shelter, the resulting world will look very different."

That all starts with education and a different view of who and what we are. We are not cogs in a machine, a product of a factory assembly line churning out efficient workers.

I often wonder where I can get started to help create that world, but honestly I have no idea.

> "‘It is rather paradoxical how we never worked towards an exam and yet I remember far more of it than I do most other subjects I was studying at the time!"

Well, it was a single optional class so it's remarkable enough to be remembered more than the rest of the classes that follow a similar structure.

The anime "Assassination Classroom" provides a perfect example of an ideal teaching environment which prepares you for life. I hope that when I am old and have enough wisdom and resources, I pass on all my learnings of real world to my students.

No, but a society without q formal education system is capable of forming people for todays needs? Can we pick a amazon indigenous and put him in a silicon valley internship?

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