RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms | Hacker News Reader

RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms

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30 pointsjeeringmole13 comments

Really good animations, really good points, but I don't recall seeing any concrete suggestions in any of these.

Are they just high-profile, high-quality rants, hoping to get others to come up with changes? Or is there something more concrete backing these that isn't disseminated with them, preventing their (really good?) ideas from being implemented?

I've only seen a few, but are others more useful? They're all interesting, but those aren't the same thing.

Right. I really like his point about the schooling being a factory, with people going through based on date of manufacture. I absolutely think it would be awesome if you could go through your grades at your own pace, in different subjects. A software based approach to learning would be excellent for this.

But of course this is completely antithetical to his latter point, which is that group based learning/problem-solving is important. You can't have groups if everyone is going at their own pace.

The happy medium might be to structure elementary education more like college, with the ability to take 100 level classes in the 4th year or whatnot. But of course, this is far more expensive than the batch method because you have to have many more classes. To support so many classes you have to have many more children, which means vastly larger schools, so you might only be able to do it in densely populated cities.

> You can't have groups if everyone is going at their own pace.

Isn't this how adults learn? (And children too, when out of the classroom.) If you want to learn something new, say how to program in Haskell, what do you do? You probably don't try to find an institution to which you pay a lot of money and which offers you in return a seat in a room along with thirty others like you in which an instructor talks to you for a few hours a week.

Instead, if you want to learn Haskell programming, you check for learning materials online and go through them at your own pace. When you get stuck, you find online forums where you can ask questions. Also, as you learn, you answer other people's questions on the forums. You are learning at your own pace but you are not isolated.

Well, that's how I learned programming, and to this day I haven't managed to collaborate with anyone on anything.

My friends that did group projects in a class, by comparison, are quite good at it.

"In June 2003, Robinson was knighted in for his achievements in creativity, education and the arts." ~Wikipedia

He has plenty of ideas. This speech is trying to get people to see that the current ideas aren't working and work together to create a new system of education.

I see this talk as an argument against "traditional" schooling. The alternative to traditional schooling is anything not traditional. In the US, that would be homeschooling or private school like Montessori. The political takeaway is that government schooling (which necessarily places emphasis on uniformity and conformity) is harmful and that private alternatives should be encouraged.

I actually like it doesn't end in a stupid one liner like most similar talks. It's not a hollywood movie, it doesn't need closure.

Further research and tests of changing policies are needed.

Concrete suggestions:

Don't treat schooling like a factory.

Don't group students by age.

Don't teach around the concept of there just being one answer.

Don't segregate people into two tracks: academic and working.

A lot of the things he's talking about are the same as what Maria Montessori advocated. If I have kids I plan on sending them to a Montessori school if I can afford it.

Those are more like concrete anti suggestions. They're things to not do, not things to do. They say what to get away from, which nearly anyone can agree on, but not on what to go towards, which few agree on, which is a big reason why they're not changing.

The best way to improve your chance of success in business is to avoid doing all the things that ensure failure, nearly all of which are well known. There is no specific plan that will give a high chance of success, but there are many specific plans for failure. Learning is the same way. But don't make the mistake of thinking that the above list of things not to do were arrived at by accident. They were not. They are intended to create failure.

Do treat schooling as character development and a place to grow children into adults. Do this by having a flexible curriculum so kids can study what's interesting to them.

Do mix age groups so that older kids can teach younger kids and thus learn the material better themselves, and younger kids can look up to the more successful older kids. If age groups are mixed, then there's might be less room for thuggery.

Do teach that there are multiple answers by having more open-ended and creative assignments.

By the way, the elementary school I went to had a special one-month period one year called "mini-course" month or something like that, where everyone could choose one of the many offered mini courses and do just that every day. This was when I got to go to the small computer lab all day every day for a month and learn basic and a database program on Apple II's. Perhaps one of the best months of my life, and incredibly enriching. You would probably never see anything like this if scoring well on a standardized test is the most important measure of a school.

For more detail on the background of factory education and the reason for it, and a bit more details on alternatives, check out John Taylor Gatto's works. He's a former NY state educator of the year who came to realize that school as we know it is bad for people.

Transcript of one interview:

http://www.ttfuture.org/files/2/pdf/gotto_interview.pdf

mp3 of another interview:

http://jari.podbean.com/mf/web/ja8dm2/LivingHero19--JohnGatt...

He also has a couple books in particular "Dumbing Us Down" and "Weapons of Mass Instruction".

I really like the animations (except for the arm, I wish the words just "appeared" sort of like the music video for "heartless" by the fray). Does anyone know of a tool that can help us make this easier?

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