What's Gone Wrong in Schooling? | Hacker News Reader

What's Gone Wrong in Schooling?

perell.com

55 pointsnkurz61 comments

As a father of two with a great interest in education I got to say I think this article beautifully articulated everything that is wrong with modern schooling.

Sadly judging by various comments here I don't think most people really grasp what the author is talking about. Not that it is odd. I also failed to grasp this most of my life.

In fact I ridiculed play oriented schooling. It was not until I became a father myself I got to observe for myself how children learn and see what a disaster school was that I finally understood what a lot of these "radicals" where actually talking about.

It is spurred me to discuss this with many other parents. I see so many of the same problems. School really has a nasty habit of killing the joy of learning. In its defense it is an okay substitute when parents have no love of learning themselves and don't encourage creativity and curiosity in their own children.

The key problem I see is that schools obsess about teaching X amount of material. Rather than focus on understanding. A child struggling with learning concepts in math will choose memorization as an efficient strategy because covering all the needed material by actually learning to understand it would take too long time.

This sort of quantity obsession means memorization almost always gets picked over genuine understanding. Actually learning to think critically and clearly is not prioritized. Sure they always claim that is prioritized. But priority implies something else is prioritized less. And that is never the case. Regardless of the flowery words, getting through the whole curriculum is always prioritized above all else.

Out of interest, which country are you in ? Approaches to education are quite varied across the world.

I had read that unschooling had turned out poorly, but while searching for evidence, it seems it goes the other way:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201406...

I think it's heavily dependent on the home environment and learning opportunities, though, and it probably can't scale to the industrial daycare that is formalized primary and secondary education.

Thanks, that was very interesting. I must read up more on this. Frankly I had never imagined such a radical approach.

I never had any intention of unschooling my children. I would have home schooled them essentially. I would have tried to reach minimums on a curriculum but I would have tried to use more of my own material and a more play oriented approach.

I also likely would have wanted my kids to occasionally attend school just for the socializing aspect and getting accustomed to the rules and rigidity of the school system, simply because it cannot be avoided later in life.

However the link you provided gives food for thought. I had not expected such a radial approach to work. Or at least I don't think it necessarily works in general. I think it depends a lot on parents.

A play oriented type of education is hard. It requires creativity and work on part of the parent.

If I compare my kids with many others e.g, many think that they do well in school because we are very serious about school work. We are not. The main difference as I see it is that we engage the curiosity and creativity of the children more. When my kids ask a question about something. They tend to get quite a long and detailed answer. I also try to make it somewhat entertaining. Not always easy. I try to find fun analogies related to things I know they like.

Far too many parents have the attitude of: "Oh don't worry about that," "that is for grown ups dear," "that is too complicated for a child to understand" etc. I don't think I have ever told my kids that something is too difficult for them so don't even ask. I always try to give some kind of answer to every question. Of course you have to point out that it is a simplification, and as they get older you can give a better explanation.

We also try to push the envelope more. We care more about what is fun than what is age appropriate. Our kids always had building toys and board games way ahead of their age. We did not care about that. It was more important if they enjoyed it. If we had e.g. a too advanced board game with a theme they liked, we just simplified the rules. When they grasped simple rules, we expanded the rules.

That’s also what I think. Was I a good parrot is also something I said to in a physics class after answering a question (high school).

One problem is that teachers don’t always understand either, they’re also parrots. They also don’t have any incentive or margin to not be a parrot.

The other problem is that our factory schools have been created by extroverts for extroverts, so participative play rather than understanding is what matters.

I didn’t like school, and that also affected in a negative way what I liked and didn’t like outside of school.

Now I see the same happening with my kid, and it’s tough to compensate.

Have you looked into Montessori schooling? It seems to address this very topic very well, albeit being so alternative a school gives some jitters.

Absolutely considered it. It was a kind of school type I used to mock when I was younger. I viewed it as a stupid hippie school. Only after having kids did I realize how prejudice and narrow minded I had been.

I am very focused on science and mathematics myself. I view those as some of the most important subjects. That give me some reluctance towards Montessori as they seem very focused on the arts.

I like a lot of the philosophy of Montessori, but I supposed I would want more play centered around developing logical and scientific thinking. But I say this as someone who knows minimal about Montessori.

Here are some examples of what I would have liked to see more of:

We play a bunch of board games at home, and I have seen the kids get to practice a lot of math playing these games. Just exchanging money and adding dice numbers practice a lot of arithmetic. You can see they enjoy this much more than doing exactly the same calculations on paper without any context.

I think a lot of early year education in e.g. mathematics could utilize board games more actively.

or roleplaying games like dungeons and dragons. because of its theme it is pushed into a corner as nerd culture, but if you look at it from another perspective it can also be summed up as improvisation and math. dungeons or monsters are not actually required.

does montessori really come across like that? i find that quite ironic, because from all the alternative systems i have seen, montessori seems to be the most efficient and scaleable. whereas most improvements to schools call for less students per teacher, montessori works well with traditional class sizes because the students learn to be independent and need less teacher attention. in other words, if there is one system that actually has the potential to improve schooling without requiring more teachers, then it is montessori.

It is because schools have a different goal than we expect. We expect them to teach, and especially help people understand problems.

They do not exists to teach. They exist to cram bare minimum of skills and knowledge so one can work. It is even worse in post-communist countries where schools actively hammer you down to the common level.

They exist to be the cheapest possible day care centers you mean. Both from the perspective of parents and, even more, from the perspective of the state/taxpayer.

> A good teacher will not only illustrate the process with a degree of clarity and detail that invites good questions, but also stand up to the resulting interrogation.

Outside of private schools, you won't be finding many teachers that can do this at all. This is only possible if IT teacher pay is competitive with FANG. If Chemistry teacher pay is competitive with Chevron. If ... and that's just not the case.

So the big problem with "play and experience teaching with 1:1 attention and lots of practical experiments" is that nobody is willing to pay for it. So we can't do that.

That brings the question: what, reasonably priced alternatives exist ? And let's assume that "youtube" is not (yet?) a good answer. What can we do with underqualified, and average intelligence at best teachers ...

That then makes the answer of "rote learning" perhaps not such a bad answer. It has the big advantage that matters: it is not required for a teacher to actually understand what they're teaching. And since this is a requirement ...

Well said. I also think with math and science, there is trauma that lasts a lifetime. It turns people off forever. They label themselves "bad at math" and it gets reinforced over and over again throughout their lives.

This is a bit left field, but another interesting read on an alternative education that seems to have worked out: this Vogue March 2020 cover story on Billie Eilish ;)

https://www.vogue.com/article/billie-eilish-cover-march-2020

Compare Feynman (1985): https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

> I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question – the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell – they couldn’t answer it at all!

(He proceeds to discuss the difference between rote learning of phrases and the ability to visualise a physical system and have insights into it. Along with a bonus example of a textbook that includes only one experimental result, which is fake and gives the wrong answer)

Eliezer Yudkowsky from LessWrong has similar essays on education, they were a quite amusing read.

Fake Explanations (2007) [0]:

> Once upon a time, there was an instructor who taught physics students. One day the instructor called them into the classroom and showed them a wide, square plate of metal, next to a hot radiator. The students each put their hand on the plate and found the side next to the radiator cool, and the distant side warm. And the instructor said, Why do you think this happens? Some students guessed convection of air currents, and others guessed strange metals in the plate. They devised many creative explanations, none stooping so low as to say “I don’t know” or “This seems impossible.” And the answer was that before the students entered the room, the instructor turned the plate around.

> Consider the student who frantically stammers, “Eh, maybe because of the heat conduction and so?” I ask: Is this answer a proper belief? The words are easily enough professed—said in a loud, emphatic voice. But do the words actually control anticipation?

> Ponder that innocent little phrase, “because of,” which comes before “heat conduction.” Ponder some of the other things we could put after it. We could say, for example, “Because of phlogiston,” or “Because of magic.”

> “Magic!” you cry. “That’s not a scientific explanation!” Indeed, the phrases “because of heat conduction” and “because of magic” are readily recognized as belonging to different literary genres. “Heat conduction” is something that Spock might say on Star Trek, whereas “magic” would be said by Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

> [...] They simply moved their magic from one literary genre to another.

Guessing the Teacher's Password (2007) [1]:

> [...] And when I finally understood, I realized that the whole time I had accepted the honest assurance of physicists that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves, I had not had the vaguest idea of what the word “wave” meant to a physicist.

> There is an instinctive tendency to think that if a physicist says “light is made of waves,” and the teacher says “What is light made of?” and the student says “Waves!”, then the student has made a true statement. That’s only fair, right? We accept “waves” as a correct answer from the physicist; wouldn’t it be unfair to reject it from the student? Surely, the answer “Waves!” is either true or false, right?

> [...] And this leads into an even worse habit. Suppose the teacher asks you why the far side of a metal plate feels warmer than the side next to the radiator. If you say “I don’t know,” you have no chance of getting a gold star—it won’t even count as class participation. But, during the current semester, this teacher has used the phrases “because of heat convection,” “because of heat conduction,” and “because of radiant heat.” One of these is probably what the teacher wants. You say, “Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?”

> This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher’s password.

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/fysgqk4CjAwh...

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-t...

Understanding is an informational compression of the relationship between the symbols.

Humans are machines for generalizing from specifics. A lot of teaching is repeated presentation of examples in the hope that the humans in the class learn the generalization.

And physics is somewhat "understandable", as in given enough inputs (some measured physical stuff + some maths) one could say that from a certain point on he/she "understands" physics, but what should we do when it comes to social sciences?

Take history for example, we don't actually know the exact reason for why Hitler came to power. Was it the fault of the Weimar democracy? Was it the fault of the Nazis themselves only? A combination of the two? Some other third factor? And, most importantly, can that happen again? We actually do not know, and we're talking about one of the most important events of the 20th century, an event that directly caused the death through extermination of millions of people. And if you extend that line of reasoning to other similar events you'd discover that we are in the dark there, too (afaik we still have no direct proof for what caused by Great Depression, we're not even sure why the Great Depression "stopped" or when exactly it "stopped").

Which is to say that we're navigating in the dark most of the time when it comes to education, saying that we "understand" some stuff is only the exception, not the rule.

Great commentary.

The idea that insights on history, society, future and humanity can be obtained by studying existing history and extrapolating it, is called historicism. Unfortunately, we don't actually know whether it works or it's a completely misguided school(s) of thought. It's simply impossible to do any controlled experiment on the history and society.

From time to time, I'll imagine how many of our serious social problems can be completely solved if it's possible to simulate the past and future accurately using a sandbox, allowing hypothesis and policies to be tested. And it's not a new idea in SciFi, for example, Isaac Asimov's Psychohistory is one.

Classes are too big.

If I dump my GCSE computer science classes that's 16,13,25,19,21. In a 60 minute lesson if you waste no time logging on/off or presenting that's at best 4.5minutes per student and worst 2.5min.

How much do you think you can debug over an hours worth of problems given 4 minutes. Including reading and figuring out the problem before explaining.

So we plan to put a child in a room with a teacher knowing pretty much full well it's at best a 50% chance they'll be the one to get help with a question.

Individual play is individual problems, which needs individual help. Much deeper there is a conflict with education and day-care.

That's just CS of course, the non-gcse sizes are: 26,27,29,28,26,28,29,31,27,28,27,26,30 if you were wondering.

That is assuming that each student needs help on every problem each lesson.

Presumably at least some of the lessons should be on how to diagnose problems I assume your talking about the programming side.

Though back when I did Computing in school (70's) in my second year I knew more than the teacher did.

ironically as I was dyslexic I wasn't allowed to take the O level as I was dumped in the CSE stream.

Even though I maxed out at CSE in maths and computing I wasn't allowed to take A level computing

Research has been done on this. There is a sweet spot range. Too few or too many decreases results. This is looking at grade school classes. Not sure how this plays out at the university level where the expectations are different and teachers have office hours to discuss questions outside of class

I can answer that one for you having recently taught a semester of postgraduate database systems to a cohort of just 6 students.

It was a blast. I followed a pre-planned course of lectures, but due to the low class sizes it didn't work out that way a lot of the time. An example, following a question about relations, I ended up doing a chalk n' talk on set theory and explained how set theory could be represented as first-order logic. Filled the wall full of Greek letters and drilled down into the topic. Then started talking about axioms. The students joined in - you could see them taking an interest, as the conversation had turned. In the event we spent 90 minutes (it was a 60 minute session) working through axiomatic set theory on the board. I had to look things up as we went. It was great, the students learned a ton (and some of the content turned up in their assignments, too) - I learned a fair bit, as Feynman will attest, there's nothing like teaching a topic to make you understand it better yourself - and it was productive and interesting.

I'm not sure I could repeat the same trick with a cohort of 20 or 30.

Student should not need individual attention every single class nor should they need help to debug each time.

they shouldn't, but they do because they are not learning to solve problems by themselves. they are not given the time or the motivation. to work on a problem until they can actually understand it.

this is what montessori for example does differently. there students work on a problem until they get it and only then they move on to the next. different students work on different problems and older students help younger ones. as a result a single teacher can manage a full classroom, and still help every student when they actually need it, because most of the time the students help themselves

Any why that doesn't work is my point about day-care. There's a % of students in that room because they can't be anywhere else.

And we're all part of that % at some point in time, no one is always accomplishing something. But school is between this and that time only.

why what doesn't work? montessori works. if you don't use montessori or similar methods obviously that doesn't work. montessori training takes about a year, half of which is spent in class (from what i remember). shouldn't be to hard to add that to traditional teacher education, so it not a problem of not being able to scale the training to more teachers. it's down to the political will to actually improve education.

Even in America, education isn't like that, is it?. I've done a college entrance exam from there and it was full of questions that required problem solving, understanding, and intelligence, not naming concepts. I even remember being surprised how it managed to avoid using the names of concepts in the questions and described scenarios instead.

I've been a teacher in other countries and it's not like that there either. No test would ever ask that question about combustion. Even not knowing a word wasn't penalized - if the student could convey the idea with a picture or slang or whatever, that would be fine too.

Whenever I had the freedom to, I'd make my tests open-book or bring-your-own-notes. I'd also give them any formulas they'd need. Rote memorization wasn't going to help them.

No. The author doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s uninformed speculation and hubris.

This does not line up with my experience attending a fairly average / slightly above average US public school. At least half my classes largely required problem-solving and critical thinking. I spent a fair amount of time parroting stuff but that's unavoidable early in education, and most of my teacher's used it as a base for higher thinking. My primary and secondary education could certainly have been better, but this article strikes me as a gross and counterproductive exaggeration.

No, this author clearly has no experience with education but wants to sound smart.

Ironically you are displaying the very problem he addresses. A smart-ass "authority" simply asserting something which we should take as truth, because there is an implication that "astura" has experience in education and knows what he/she is talking about.

Ironically you prove his point. The problem today are too many astura style assertions of truth "listen to me, I have experience!!!" instead of promoting critical thinking and genuine understanding.

I attended an expensive private school until 6th grade, a typical public school from 6th-8th grade, and did my 'high-school' years at an online school.

I learned legitimate skills at the private and traditional public schools. I learned nothing of value at the cyber school. The first two actually focused on developing a concept to the point where it could be applied. Math was one such example. The cyber school was very obviously designed to allow the students to just cheat. As in, literally have the book open in your lap and take the test.

If I had gone to the cyber school for my entire education cycle I'd undoubtedly be severely disadvantaged in the same way described by the [0] article (about Feynman )linked in another comment. Parroting facts can get you the job, but it won't help you do the job.

[0] https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

The closest I've come to this is when I was doing my (now on-hold, potentially permanently) MBA. Some courses (especially strategy, leadership, ethics, and law) were extremely good, but others (econ, accounting) were stuck on rote memorization and calculations.

It was the combination of a semester of econ+accounting, plus applying the knowledge of the opportunity cost concept that I had been exposed to in a previous class, that convinced me continuing in the program was not the most optimal investment for me (so here I am, slacking off on HN instead...).

I had some tests like that in grade school and middle school. They would mostly ask for memorized definitions or describe a scenario that was copied from the textbook.

Sure, those tests were not important in the long run, but at the time most of my day was dedicated to that sort of pointless bullshit.

I don't think you are seeing the forrest for the trees. He is trying to explain the problem in an abstracted and condensed form. He is not suggesting that the combustion example is literally the question you get.

Although the GRE tests e.g. so important in the US, are almost literally of this kind. It requires massive memorization to score well on. I know because I had to take the damn thing to get into a US university.

> No test would ever ask that question about combustion. Even not knowing a word wasn't penalized - if the student could convey the idea with a picture or slang or whatever, that would be fine too.

The example is not meant to be taken this literally. Rather it is that the type of explanation you are expected to give is often very narrowly defined.

I have plenty of experience with this. I remember in my algorithm class. I helped a lot of students who struggled with understanding algorithms. At the exam several of them got much better score than me despite me knowing I had far better grasp of the concepts. The difference is that I used my own words to explain concepts, while students who got top score basically regurgitated the teacher.

I have helped high school students with math problems. I tried showing them different ways to solve the same problem to get them to understand how to think about a problem. However they were terrified of learning alternative ways of doing it. They insisted I teach them to solve the problem EXACTLY as their teacher had. Step by step entirely mechanically. That is what the school system encourages: regurgitation. They may not be asked to say individual words like "combustion" but the get accustomed to solving problems in a very standardised mechanical fashion.

> Whenever I had the freedom to, I'd make my tests open-book or bring-your-own-notes. I'd also give them any formulas they'd need. Rote memorization wasn't going to help them.

In many ways that may be counter productive. E.g. in my physics class I memorized very few equations. Instead I learned to understand them and derive them myself. During test I could derive any equation I needed. If I had been allowed to bring the book, I could have simply looked up the equation. No need to understand it. No need to be able to derive it yourself.

Hence I don't think that really solved any problem. That is like using Google as a substitute for real understanding.

And really the problem runs far deeper than this. The problem is that many of the school books themselves don't actually teach any understanding.

Chemistry books are a good example of this. They just spit out facts starting from the atom and building it up. A few years ago I came across a chemistry book that really opened my eyes on how to approach the material. It starts with chemical reactions, and add theory to help you understand and predict things about these reactions.

They add one little piece of theory for each problem. As you hit on new problems to explain a chemical reaction, they add another piece of theory. Or rather they refine the theory. Rather than an incremental presentation of atom theory it is an iterative explanation. They begin with very simple models of chemical reactions which does not involved atoms at all.

You end up with modern atomic theory towards the end of the book as that is needed to grasp more complex reactions or details.

The important part of this approach is that it teaches scientific thinking. It teaches how to think about chemistry. It teaches that science is about building models and using those for making good predictions.

Science as taught today turns it all on its head. It gives you the answer before you even heard the question in a sense. You are explained atom theory without a clear sense of why it is needed.

In a sense the teaching method is no different than religious instruction. An authority tells you facts you must believe in, but you are given no rational reason for why you should believe these things.

Why does any of this matter? Because we live in a world full of "fake news" and pseudo science, and people cannot tell the difference because they have only been taught to listen to authorities. They have not been taught why this explanation makes MORE sense than an alternative explanation.

I think it's actually worse than "parroting" as described in the first few paragraphs: Back in highschool around 2005, I and a couple friends realized we could get passing grades in multiple-choice tests just by getting a sense of the teacher, and the style they'd use to invent the wrong answers. Didn't even need to parrot anything.

I took the authors "play the game" line as including other aspects like this. Parroting just being the larger theme.

Most thoughtful people seem to agree that school is bad for creativity and that real learning is led by curiosity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

But we still have little idea how curiosity works exactly or how an institution could be turned from an exam factory into something a bit closer to a child's bedroom and computer at home, i.e. to a place of play.

For most of life we need permission to play. Parents allocate 'screen time'. At university one is effectively granted permission to do 'curiosity-led' research by an external grant agency.

So what does institutionalised play look like? Perhaps something like a university. Yet how much could university life be said to be 'following the fun'?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idvGlr0aT3c

I think institutionalized play would look more like a library staffed with people in place of the books - and a traditional library on premises. Ie have people of “all” careers or skills do some portion of their work on site with a way for interested students to engage with them. Maybe they offer classes for the really interested. Definitely leave a casual way to interact with the experts that’s noncommittal. Like have a request board for students to post topics or expertise they’d like a subject area expert discuss the basics of within a lecture.

I have to redline the current practice of heavily weighting towards exams and giving almost no weight to homework or reflections of actual effort towards learning. Some careers may pivot on crucial hour long expositions of skills (ala sales or trial law), but mostly people have time to figure out a problem and carefully plan or communicate with coworkers and more experienced people.

Your end grade should reflect your performance 99% of the time instead of .01% or whatever portion effectively one lecture length of a class represents.

I wanted to respond to just this statement:

For most of life we need permission to play. Parents allocate 'screen time'.

I don't disagree with your larger point but in my experience the limitation on screen time is an important protection of unstructured, self-directed play (especially for younger kids).

Seconded. My kid will take however much screen time he's allowed. I usually resort to authority to separate him from his screens. Otherwise, I can nudge him away from screens to precious few choice activities, but I don't remember ever seeing him disengaging a screen without nudging, except for physiological needs.

Isn't this basically a Montessori school?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

So... does this guy know anything about education systems? What's his perspective? Was he a teacher for 25 years?

Why did I read this?!

edit: my bad, I missed that this is a guest post; doesn't change my opinion of Perell though. I'd genuinely recommend his newsletter.

He is an "essayist". I'm subbed to his newsletter because he's excellent at finding good reading material, but his original writing is often insufficiently informed (charitably) or arrogant (uncharitably), and in poor style. This boggles the mind, since he sells online instruction in writing.

FYI although this article is published on the website of David Perell it was written by Mason Hartman who I believe goes by female pronouns.

Ah, I missed that and thought this was Perell's work.

I don't know, but as someone who has been interested in this for a long time and who likes to observe how children learn, I think he was right on point.

Honestly he is really just articulating well, what everybody ought to already know if they have previously had any interest in the topic.

I do not know which educational system the author is referring to but there are aspects to this that ring true concerning education in America- both in terms of what happens in many high schools and then what students come to expect when they enter college (and in some cases are unpleasantly shocked, but in other cases have their expectations fulfilled). And I think i can identify some of the literature(s) that influenced the writer. IN my opinion though, the ideas are not new, nor do they really tell the full complex story of education.

The assumption here is that all children who enter schools are capable of being curious and creative people but the system crushes it out of them.

I don't think so. I think schools transform students into parrots because that's the only way to get most of the children to pass the tests. Educational outcomes for children are primarily decided by parents, not schools.

What even is this? An essay competition? A vague pitch for a nonexistent product? The author clearly lacks the foundation to be making such authoritative claims.

I do not know.. his UX design seems up to date in that he is applying human behavior to UX

Asking "why" is a taboo for students in most schools

I don't understand why you would use the pronoun she in a context where the pronoun them and they would be wholly appropriate.

It's become standard etiquette/respect/decency to use the pronouns preferred by the subject. Yes, it's an adjustment for us "old" folks over ~30 or so, but it gets easier with exposure and mindfulness.

hmmm, I wonder if a trans person would agree...

I haven't done any formal polling, but all the trans people I know prefer to be addressed by the pronouns of their choosing.

what if the author is writing about a trans person, which preference takes precedence? Did the author imply trans students don't exist when choosing to use a gender-specific pronoun to describe the student body?

I'm not understanding what the difficulty is. Always use the pronouns preferred by the person the pronouns are referring to. After that, basic grammar rules apply.

> what if the author is writing about a trans person

The author of the article in question isn't writing about trans persons in particular; you're trying to create a problem where there is none.

> Did the author imply trans students don't exist

No. Neither did the author imply that boys don't exist by using the pronoun "she". Only an intentionally uncharitable reading would lead one to that conclusion. Again, you're trying to create a problem where there is none.

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