Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion

acq5.com

16 pointsCaptainZapp10 comments

This is blogspam copying a NY Times article from two days ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley...

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19711851

The bit about them learning in isolation made me sad. School is not simply a matter of memorizing facts, it's also a space for children to develop socially.

Generally a pretty shitty one at that, full of bullying, cliques, popularity contests and anxiety. Being constantly surrounded only by people your own exact age for 18 years isn't a great design.

> Being constantly surrounded only by people your own exact age for 18 years isn't a great design

Some kids are bullied, so it's best if kids isolate themselves until they go to college?

I don't think my comment implies isolation. What I'm saying is that it would be better for students to not all be pushed through school at the same rigid one-size-fits-all pace, not only so that they can learn better, but so that they can be exposed to a wider variety of students of different ages, and have the opportunity to play mentor and mentored with them. Part of learning and developing socially is not just the content, but this dynamic, and it's largely absent. And when people your own age are just a fraction of those you're exposed to, and you also interact with people who you look up to and people who look up to you, I think many of the situations that currently lead to bullying and anxiety would be tempered.

Ah, I see your point now. Fair enough.

Out of curiosity, is it legal to post an article from the Times on you own site without making it clear that it was pulled from another publication and without the name of the original author?

IMHO it's illegal even if you make it clear that it was pulled from another publication and with the name of the original author.

If one of the selling points of Summit is individualized learning, shouldn't it be taking into account that online learning might not always be the best option (even if it usually is, a statement that I'm not sure I agree with). Someone with epilepsy, whose doctor has recommended limiting screen time to, should not be using this.

> “There’s people who don’t want change. They like the schools the way they are,” she said. “The same people who don’t like Summit have been the sort of vocal opposition to change throughout the process.”

This is an infuriating sentence. It's dismissive of a huge swath of people, and demonstrates an attitude of unwarranted superiority. It's the same attitude that gets people pissed at education systems in general.

People care about their kids' education, and they aren't against change. They may say "The new way is stupid, I learned fine the old way", but if you dig deeper the reasons they will only hint at become apparent:

* New education methods often teach new working methods. If you haven't spent time and energy getting parents involved in how they work, they can't help their kids learn. Parents don't want to feel stupid when their kid asks them for help with simple arithmetic, and they don't know the methodology the kids are required to use.

* There's a huge amount of lip service in education to "there are also other ways to achieve the answer", but grades are affected negatively if the preferred method isn't used (in "show your work" type problems). Further, teachers are dismissive or condescending to students who work better with a methodology that differs from the 'one true' method.

* There are whole swathes of subtlety and context dependent answers that get reduced to "this one is right the rest are wrong" which leads to a mentality of "there's always the one right answer". Generations of people have been trained that this is true, so any new attempt to get past this can't just be shoehorned in and forced on parents, see my first point.

Finally there are the people who are just cautious. They don't necessarily think the status quo is good, they just don't want to be an experiment[1] - it's 100% reasonable to be concerned that the new experimental method may turn out to be worse that status quo, and result in setting the kids back.

[1] Since we are talking about the lifelong results of education, it takes a couple decades to find out if the changes actually had a real, long-term impact of a method of teaching. Lot's of people argue against this notion, pointing at short-term grades, and test performance, but the people pushing the new methods talk about how they will set the kindergarteners up for "better college results, and better career results". When talking about 5 year olds, we need to wait at least 25 years to see how they are faring in their careers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com